Critical Path Analysis would have helped me in past had I done that earlier in one of the larger projects that I managed/led. There was another manager I was working with on that project. That project was for a Bank in Hong Kong and the over all project was around 1 year in duration and around $3 million in cost, including project definition and requirements, design and implementation and support for 2 months after go live. The project was not complex but there were over 5000 tasks and of-course the resources were limited, just like any other project. But the key in the project were the dependencies of the tasks.
I think if I had known the Critical Path Analysis concept in detail at that point and the advantages of using that and what we can do when dependent tasks are not getting completed which is affecting the critical path, would have really helped. Critical Path Analysis (CPA) even though I knew it at that time but did not fully understand the implications and what I can do with it to ensure project success. I would have easily determined the changing critical path by due to the dependent tasks taking longer. Making sure and analyzing the Critical path on a regular basis I would have easily prioritized the activities for project completion in time. I might have been able to fast track by completing more activities in parallel or I might have been able to crash the critical path by adding some more temporary resources. Since project schedules change on a regular basis CPA allows continuous monitoring of the schedule, allows the project manager to track the critical activities, and alerts the project manager to the possibility that non-critical activities may be delayed beyond their total float, thus creating a new critical path and delaying project completion, which is really key for the success of a project. I wish Microsoft Office comes up some automatic alert mechanism for this.
Continuous monitoring of the project Critical path would have enabled me to manage resource allocation in the most advantageous way, minimize damage when high-risk activities were getting late, contingency planning could have been prioritized by activity risk factors. Critical activities (highest risk) identified and focused attention could have been given at the right time. Critical path analysis is very useful for planning and examining projects in which multiple activities are underway simultaneously. In future whenever I am working on any major projects I am going to make sure that I do that.
The scheduling requirements for a “small” project (consisting of a limited number of activities) is not that much complex; but when the number of activities becomes large and/or the sequencing of activities becomes complex and “on time” completion of a project becomes important, then critical path analysis is really essential. In fact I must say Continuous CPA is a key for large complex projects success.
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This post was written by techhair on December 14, 2007
