What
will it cost to accelerate the schedule?
We’ve all heard of “throwing money at a
project” to try to shorten the timeline. But where should
you throw the money? If you are going to spend more money in
order to shorten task durations, it only makes sense to stick
to the critical path – shortening tasks not on the critical
path won’t shorten the overall project. However, as you
shorten tasks, be aware that a new critical path may emerge.
Another
common practice is to calculate the cost per unit time to
shorten each task. Then, throw your money first at the tasks
that are the least expensive to shorten per unit of time. This is a PDM (activity-on-node)
diagram of a project with six tasks. The duration of each task
is written above each node.
Can you spot the critical
path? |