critical path method Archives

Project Management Terms – Critical Path

Critical Path is the sequence of activities for which the slightest delay will influence the end of the project. The critical path of a project may change in time according to the new changes of the project schedule. In a project there can be several critical paths. Tasks that compose the critical path are called critical tasks.

Critical tasks need a special attention as they are more likely to compromise the completion date. Sometimes the project manager needes to see those tasks that could delay the project finish if they are late with a certain amount of time, in other words the tasks with a slack smaller than a given value.

In RationalPlan Project Management Software the Critical Path can be displayed by pressing the corresponding button from the toolbar while in Gantt view.

Project Management – The Light On The Critical Path

The mysterious critical path notion seems to put project managers in difficulty and especially the novice ones. However if anyone would take just a few minutes from his precious time to pay a closer attention to it things would be a lot more clear.

The origin

In order to clear things up we need to have a background knowledge. On short it all started with the Critical Path Method (CPM) an algorithm for scheduling activities within a project. This method is best used within the project scheduling phase and basically it requires to construct a model of the project that includes:

the list of activities needed to complete the project (aka Work Breakdown Structure defined in the project planning phase)
the duration estimates for these activities
the dependencies between the tasks

Graphical representation

There are two possibilities to render the structure created according to CPM: activity on arrow and activity on node. The most used representation nowadays is the activity on node. The activities are rendered as nodes and each node contains the duration of that activity while the dependencies are rendered as arrows where the arrowhead points to the successor while the tail to the predecessor.

To some extent a Gantt chart can also be considered as a CPM presentation although a more complex one. (more…)