Project management Glossary of Terms - Critical Path
Critical Path – the sequence of activities for which the slightest delay will influence the end of the project.
In a project it can be several critical paths as shown in the picture below:
To see critical tasks in RationalPlan press Critical Path button in View Toolbar. By default their color is red, but it has the option to change this.
Critical tasks needs a special attention in any project as they are more likely to compromise the completion date. Sometimes the project manager needes to see tasks that could delay the project finish if they are late with a certain number of days, with other words the tasks with a slack smaller than a certain value.
In the previous example, if slack for critical tasks is set to 3 days, Gantt Chart will look like this:
As seen, non-critical tasks in the first picture has become "critical" for a "cautious" project manager.