What is Moovila’s Robotic Project Assessment Index (RPAX)?

What is RPAX? Why do people need it? And what can it do for projects or a project portfolio? 

Without a fire alarm in the home, people are 60 percent more likely to die in a fire. That alarm alerts before a glowing ember turns into a conflagration. There was a time, though, when people relied on human diligence to prevent fires. Looking back, it is hard to imagine living that way. Instead of practicing constant vigilance, people can rest and focus on things that matter to them, relying on the alarm to alert them to danger.  

RPAX is like a fire alarm for projects. 

When it comes to managing projects, many teams are living in the pre-fire alarm era. They rely on the diligence of a few people to identify problems then suffer the inevitable crisis that occurs when attentiveness isn’t enough to avert disaster. Just as relying on humans to spot fires resulted in much death and destruction, leaving project problem detection to humans leads to projects that become calamities. There are a lot of project fatalities because of this. In fact, more than 50 percent of technical projects fail. 

In 2020, Mike Psenka, CEO of Moovila, invented the project fire alarm: The Robotic Project Assessment Index (RPAX). Think of it as an early warning system created to ensure confidence in project timelines. Users can glance at the RPAX score of a project and know in a second how much confidence they should have that the project will be delivered on time and on budget, with the project plan containing all necessary information to prevent risks. 

Risk Scoring Indicators 

As teams build and execute project plans, RPAX constantly observes 25 factors per project to determine if the projects in a portfolio will meet date and cost standards. A few of these factors include missing start dates, durations, time estimates, dependencies, late milestones or milestones at risk, and more. RPAX compares these factors to the calendars and workloads of everyone working on the plan to calculate the likelihood that any given project timeline is accurate. 

It displays the score in a colorful visual indicator: 

An RPAX score can range from 1 to 1000, where the lower the score, the more attention that project plan needs. The projects needing more attention are marked in red to indicate a low RPAX score. On the other hand, a project with a green RPAX indicator is one that is healthy and optimized!  If a user is in their project portfolio view and sees green, across the board, they can feel confident that their projects are on track and focus on the work in front of them instead of stopping to pour over project details. 

Intelligent Portfolio Management 

RPAX is good at reviewing individual complex project plans, but its value becomes most apparent when teams start to manage a portfolio of dozens or even hundreds of projects. It’s nearly impossible for humans to keep track of the granular details each project plan requires... let alone tracking these details over the span of an entire project portfolio. Luckily, RPAX was invented as an intelligent solution ready to make risk management possible for teams managing projects at a larger scale.  

Project teams leaning on RPAX have the ability to take on more project work without needing to take on the extra stress. They know exactly where to divert their attention when opening their project portfolio view. Because RPAX is operating constantly in the background, engineers or project managers can glance at their project portfolio to see which projects need attention. RPAX labels each project in the portfolio with a hard-to-miss color-coded score.

Here’s what that looks like: 

When RPAX identifies flaws in a plan, it does not leave teams guessing. The Critical Path View of a project keeps the RPAX debugger handy on the right-hand side, showing which “bugs” or risks are present in a project at that moment in time. Users have the option to drill into each “bug” to locate where the risky milestones or tasks are on the Critical Path. 

The flagged bugs in the RPAX Debugger are mathematical mistakes, omissions, and dates that can’t work. And it calculates the impact of these problems on the project completion date. 

Guided Remediation 

What if a project team member doesn’t know how to fix these flaws, though? If they are an engineer – not a project manager – they don’t have time to learn project management best practices – even if this knowledge would help keep projects on track. Fortunately, they don’t need to. RPAX will make the solution clear. Guided by the remediation coach: Carmen. 

Let’s say a user neglected to add durations to a project plan. Maybe they omitted this because they aren’t aware of why the durations are important or how to set them up. Users can tap Carmen, the embedded AI project analyst and coach, and she will identify the problem and pull up the relevant tasks and projects to walk through fixing the issues. 

In the upper left corner, Carmen identifies the issue, explains why it puts the plan at risk, and tells how to fix it. She pulls up all the relevant tasks to make the fix easy and offers micro learning modules on the topic if someone want to dig in deeper. Of course, the user can simply add the durations (or whatever issues RPAX found) and keep going.  

Instant Score Updates 

Once the problems identified by RPAX are resolved, the score reflects these efforts instantly. In this example, adding durations to five tasks that lacked them, boosted the score from 208 (deep into the red) to 289.  

Carmen then pulls up the next set of issues and shows the same explanation and remediation guide for the new risks. 

In this way, project teams are quickly whipping their projects into risk-free shape by following the issues RPAX flags and letting Carmen guide the remediation.  

If project managers ignore a problem, their score will continue to drop. If more problems emerge – because resources are overburdened or become unavailable, for example – the score will also drop. RPAX works tirelessly, 24 hours a day, to monitor projects so that teams can glance and remediate to keep them on track. Since it has access to the schedules and workloads everyone on the team, it knows – often before they could possibly discover it – when changing schedules and resource workloads affect project plans.  

Want to learn more about RPAX? Check out our Project Risk Management webinar where Moovila CEO, Mike Psenka, chats with Senior Program Manager, Louis Bagdonas, about risk management and RPAX.