What Is Full Monte SRA and How Does It Work With Microsoft Project or Primavera P6?

Updated

Full Monte SRA is Barbecana's Schedule Risk Analysis (SRA) system. It performs quantitative risk analysis directly inside your existing Microsoft Project or Primavera P6 schedule, so you don't have to export your plan to a separate tool and re-import the results. It's aimed at organizations where a realistic project forecast is a business requirement — Barbecana states it is trusted by major western Aerospace & Defense contractors, space agencies, private space companies, and pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers.

The core idea: analysis inside the source schedule

Most risk analysis workflows force a round trip: export the schedule, run the analysis elsewhere, then try to reconcile the output with the live plan. Full Monte SRA avoids that by running the quantitative analysis within the schedule itself. Two consequences follow from that design:

  • No import/export step. The schedule you analyze is the schedule you maintain, which removes a time-consuming and error-prone conversion step.
  • Results publish back into the source schedule. Because the analysis lives where the plan lives, you can publish results directly into the schedule rather than maintaining a separate report that drifts out of date.

If your team already maintains a detailed Microsoft Project or Primavera P6 schedule, this means the risk analysis is an extension of existing work rather than a parallel deliverable.

What "quantitative" means here

Full Monte SRA is a Schedule Risk Analysis system, which sits in the broader family of quantitative risk techniques Barbecana groups under project simulation, project scheduling, and project risk analysis. The distinction that matters for choosing a tool:

Approach Typical question it answers
Qualitative risk registers Which risks matter most, and who owns them?
Quantitative schedule risk analysis (Full Monte SRA) Given uncertainty in durations and logic, what does the completion date distribution actually look like?

The second question is the one that drives realistic forecasts, and it's the one Full Monte SRA is built for.

The two products on the site

Barbecana's site presents two tools, and they address different problems:

  • Full Monte SRA — the Schedule Risk Analysis system described above. The site lists Overview, Features, Tutorials and other documents, Support & Version Information, Free Trial, Downloads, and Purchase pages for it.
  • Schedule Inspector — a separate product for verifying schedule quality. The site lists Overview, Features, Free Trial, Support, and Buy Now pages for it.

A practical way to think about the split: Schedule Inspector checks whether the schedule is built well enough to trust; Full Monte SRA then quantifies the uncertainty in that schedule. Teams serious about forecast credibility often need both, but they are distinct purchases.

Getting started

The site provides a Free Trial for both Full Monte SRA and Schedule Inspector, plus a Downloads section and a Tutorials and other Documents section for Full Monte SRA. For a first evaluation, the sensible sequence is:

  1. Download the free trial.
  2. Work through the tutorials using one of your own Microsoft Project or Primavera P6 schedules rather than a sample file — the value of the tool depends on your schedule's structure.
  3. Compare the analysis output against your current forecast to see where the two diverge.

Pricing is not published on the pages reviewed here; the site routes purchases through dedicated "Purchase Full Monte SRA" and "Buy Now" pages, so check those for current terms rather than assuming a price or license model.

Version and support notes

Full Monte SRA 3.8 Update 3 is current as of the site content. Two details worth knowing before you plan a rollout:

  • The update includes a new optional install that does not require Administrator Rights, which matters in locked-down enterprise environments where IT approval is slow.
  • Customers with a current maintenance and support agreement can obtain the new release free of charge.

For release specifics, the site points to the release note; for licensing questions, it directs users to [email protected].

Where it fits

Full Monte SRA is not a general project management suite. It's a specialist tool for teams that already run serious schedules in Microsoft Project or Primavera P6 and need defensible, quantitative forecasts from them. If your organization is in aerospace, defense, space, pharma, or medical devices — the sectors Barbecana names — the direct-in-schedule workflow and the no-admin-rights install option are the two features most likely to determine whether adoption is practical.