CRITICAL PATH

What is a critical tasks?

Tasks that cannot be delayed without affecting the project finish date are the critical tasks.

A task become critical when it meets any one of the following condition:

• It has no slack.

• It has a Must Start On (MSO) or Must Finish On (MFO) date constraint.

• It has an As Late As Possible (ALAP) constraint in a project scheduled from a start date.

• It has an As Soon As Possible (ASAP) constraint in a project scheduled from a finish date.

• It has a finish date that is the same as or beyond its deadline date.

What does a critical path show about your project?

By knowing and tracking the critical path for your project, as well as the resources assigned to critical tasks, you can determine which tasks can affect your project's finish date and whether your project will finish on time.

How do i shorten the critical path?

If you want to bring in the project finish date, you need to bring in the dates of your critical path tasks. This is also known as crashing  a project. To do this, you can:

• Shorten the duration or work on a task on the critical path.
• Change a task constraint to allow for more scheduling flexibility.
• Break a critical in a smaller tacks that can be worked on simultaneously by different resources.
• Revise task dependencies to allow more scheduling flexibility.
• Set lead time between dependent tasks where applicable.
• Schedule overtime.
• Assign additional resources to work on critical path tasks.