Confidence Intervals and Limits for Projects

The whole point of studying statistics in the context of projects is to make it easier to forecast outcomes and put plans in place to affect those outcomes if they are not acceptable or reinforce outcomes if they present a good opportunity for the project. It often comes down to "confidence" rather than a specific number. Confidence in a statistical sense means "with what probability will the outcome be within a range of values?" Estimating confidence stretches the project-forecasting problem from estimating the probability of a specific value for an outcome to the problem of forecasting an outcome within certain limits of value.

Mathematically, we shift our focus from the PDF to the cumulative probability function. Summing up or integrating the probability distribution over a range of values produces the cumulative probability function. The cumulative probability equals the sum (or integral) of the probability distribution over all possible outcomes.