Critical Path Analysis

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Scheduling for complex and intricate projects is a difficult task.  Critical path analysis is a valuable technique to help you plan all of the tasks that are needed to complete your project.  Critical path analysis acts as the foundation to let you create the project schedule and to plan your resource allocations.  The critical path for a project is the longest timescale of dependent tasks that run from the start to the end of the project.

Once your project is under way, the critical path analysis will help you keep track of progress and see where corrective action needs to be taken.  Integral within the critical path analysis is the ability to represent the minimum timescale needed to complete your project.  If your project needs to delivery quicker, the critical path analysis can help you identify those tasks that can be accelerated.

At the planning stage, critical path analysis helps you build your plan and test it with rigor.  The key benefit of critical path analysis is that it shows you which tasks must be completed on time for the project to complete on time. These are known as the critical tasks.  Critical tasks, then, have no slack – that is, they have no built in contingency for any delays.  Tasks that do not lie on the critical path, will have an amount of slack that is acceptable before they will have an impact on the overall delivery of the project.  If a task that is not on the critical path slips sufficiently, it will find itself joining others on the critical path.  These tasks that have allowable slack in their timescales are ones which, if necessary, can be allowed to slip if resources are needed elsewhere on more critical tasks.  As project activities complete and actual dates and durations become known, the project manager will be able to identify a new critical path, which may become apparent.

In terms of reporting and communicating the project’s progress, a Gantt chart, which gives you a visual representation of your tasks on a horizontal timeline, is perhaps more appropriate so, in reality, you may look to manage a combination of charts to give you the full benefits of each.

Like its Gantt chart counterpart, the critical path analysis allows you to represent dependencies between tasks, along with unrelated tasks that can be carried out concurrently to give a complete picture of the project.

Critical Path Analysis benefits at a glance:

• Provides a visual graphical view of the project
• Determines what tasks are needed for the project
• What tasks need to be done sequentially and what tasks can be done concurrently
• Determines the  shortest timescale within which the project can successfully be completed
• Identifies the resources needed to complete the project
• Represents the priorities of project tasks
• How to reduce the overall timescale of a project, if needed
• The impact of changes to the original plan can be calculated, which is useful given that we rarely (if ever) produce the right schedule first time!

Creating an accurate critical path analysis can help secure the success of your project!