After putting a lot of effort into project planning, suddenly you observed that one of your tasks took much longer than expected and during that time a new assignment pop-up.
Also, in such a situation one of the important team members took leave for a few days.
Source: Projectmanager
But you shouldn’t let those events frustrate you, with the Critical Path analysis you can address all these issues.
“A project without a critical path is like a ship without a rudder.” — D. Meyer, Illinois Construction Law
If something comes in the team’s way, you can look for the alterations without causing any delay in the milestones or missing any deadlines.
A critical analysis is a method of project management.
It creates the shortest timeline for your project, looking at the tasks needed to complete the deliverables, along with the estimated time needed for each step, dependency of the task, and the final milestones.
It is a methodology planned to handle your project in an intelligent way.
With a Critical path, you get the idea about the tasks which can be a reason for the project fall.
Source: Planacademy
It will show you the timeline of the Gantt chart, and the task in the critical path turns red. The tasks that are not on the critical path remain in their original color.
“No matter how good the team or how efficient the methodology, if we’re not solving the right problem, the project fails.” – Woody Williams
It’s time to find the critical path in your projects, but how?
To help you identify the critical path in your projects here is a step by step description:
As you start finding your critical path, you need to break down what’s involved in the projects.
Breakdown the project structure into:
After identifying the project scope, it’s time to know the paths and strings. A project holds many connected and dependency tasks. So you need to identify these tasks.
To find out the critical path, you need to identify the task with the longest sequence. The longest sequence in your project management is the critical path in your project.
A project has many series of interrelated tasks. The team tries to complete the tasks, so as to reduce the stress of critical paths.
The development in the project reduces the critical path in a task or it might bring a new critical path in your task. So, the critical path in the task changes with the development of the projects.
The project scope either reduces or you might need to assign more people to your task. You can get more than one critical path in a task. It usually changes with the progress in the work.
In the present era, we handle many important projects. These projects are not easy to handle. It needs a lot of planning and execution.
