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?