Critical Chain Project Management

Critical path analysis identifies the most efficient and cost effective way of completing a complex project. The various activities which together will make up the project are identified, and the order of these activities are identified. Then, the duration of each activity is estimated and these factors are then arranged as a network or graph, showing the whole project from start to finish, and showing which tasks can happen at the same time. The sequence of tasks which have to be done one after another with no gaps in between is called the Critical Path.

Analyzing the critical path, there is a high level risk as it runs parallel to itself, more than one task at a particular time could delay project. Some other tasks run parallel to the critical path and have same duration; a delay in one of these tasks will change the critical path and delay the whole project.

Dependency Determination is a tool that the project manager will employ managing time on this project. The

Critical path is based on deterministic task duration, while critical chain involves the deterministic and probabilistic approaches;

(b) Which activities should be crashed to meet a project deadline of 12 days at minimum cost?

A) The weekly budget is formed by only using the early start times of each activity.

(TCO F) Why is it important to determine the critical path of a project? What happens if activities along the path are delayed? What happens if activities along the path are accelerated?

In almost every business, project management is critically important. The critical path method (CPM) will provide a timeline for the project manager for when tasks should be completed. In addition, providing a deadline and the negative effects it will have on the following successors if not completed on time. These many task are interdepended. Therefore, the CPM provides the start and finishes times of the tasks, and identifies the few tasks on the critical path that the project manager should observe to determine which task needs the most attention. Already discovering and incorporating the details the task or assignments may require, CPM calculates all task times, which can be measured in hours, days, weeks, and months. For any unintended manually input errors, a warning message will be provided. Including an automatic successor generator, task numbering comment, and data validation, makes it easier on the project manager.

Critical Path: The sequence of activities that represents the longest path through a project, which determines the shortest possible duration.

construct a network diagram for a project determine critical path and expected completion time of a project with deterministic task times (note: some of us also do calculations for probabilistic times, but not required) calculate slack times for a particular task know how to “crash” a project down to a certain completion time at the lowest cost (note: just the concept of crashing needs to be discussed and not the calculations; some of us do the calculations, others do not)

Before deciding which activities should be crashed, Bjorn and his team first need to have a clear understanding of the project's priorities. To do this the team has first defined the project's scope and decided to develop a project priority matrix.

In field of project management, there are a plethora of mechanisms under perpetual reevaluation. One specific segmentation of project management under such scrutiny pertains to cost duration, which is the time and monetary costs of completing individual tasks within the project’s critical path (IBM Knowledge Center, 2016). The process of monitoring and evaluating the time and financial impacts of each task is referred to as cost duration analysis (IBM Knowledge Center, 2016). A chief concern of cost duration analysis is identifying tasks within the project’s critical path which can reduce project duration (PMI, 2013). A common approach to reducing a project’s duration is task “crashing” (PMI, p.181). According to The Project Management Institute (2013) crashing refers to the process of methodical determining the financial value of increasing a critical path task’s resources in order to decrease project duration (p.181).

From Figure 1, we know that the critical path is Activity 1-2-5-7-10-13-15. It is because if there is any change of time in the Activities on the critical path, the whole progress time of the project will change. Therefore, we choose to crash the activities on the critical path with the lowest crash cost in order to lower the time used with minimum additional cost. Activity 7 has the lowest crash cost within the Activities on the critical path. So, we choose to crash Activity 7 first.

4. During which month of the project are the highest and lowest costs expected to

Project scheduling can be performed in many ways. Some of the more common and popular methods of project scheduling are network analysis and the critical path method of scheduling (CPM). Although companies do not always use these methods in there exact form, most do tend to use a modified version of one or both of these methods. I discovered that Craft does not use network analysis or CPM, but they do have a scheduling method that works for them and is quite similar to CPM.