Robust project management with the tilted beta distribution

Abstract

Recent years have seen an increase in the development of robust approaches for stochastic project management methodologies such as PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique). These robust approaches allow for elevated likelihoods of outlying events, thereby widening interval estimates of project completion times. However, little attention has been paid to the fact that outlying events and/or expert judgments may be asymmetric. We propose the tilted beta distribution which permits both elevated likelihoods of outlying events as well as an asymmetric representation of these events. We examine the use of the tilted beta distribution in PERT with respect to other project management distributions.