Ebook Lessons in Project Management (2e): Part 2

Ebook Lessons in Project Management (2e): Part 2 presents the following content: Identify the Critical Path and How This Path Drives the End Date; Change Assumptions to Revise an Estimate; Don’t Forget Face-to-Face Communication on Your Project; Make Quality a Mindset and Ongoing Process; Batch Small Scope Change Requests for Sponsor Approval; Manage Your Vendor Projects Proactively; Look for Risks Inherent to Your Project; Get Sponsor Approval Before Investigating Large Scope Change Requests; Make Sure the Cost of Collecting Metrics Does Not Exceed Their Value;...
Nội dung trích xuất từ tài liệu:
Ebook Lessons in Project Management (2e): Part 2 CHAPTER 25 Identify the Critical Path and How This Path Drives the End Date The majority of my work involved meeting with people and helping them through one or two particular project problems. I rarely had a chance to meet with someone regularly and help them complete their project from start to finish. That was a big reason why Jerry and I had become very comfortable working with each other. Meeting with him regularly made me feel like a part of the team and allowed me to see not only the T. Mochal et al., Lessons in Project Management © Tom Mochal and Jeff Mochal 2011 106 Identify the Critical Path and How This Path Drives the End Date progression of the project but also his professional progression as he learned more and more about being a better project manager. Another person I helped frequently—although not as often as Jerry—was Ashley Parker. It was the middle of June; her team had just completed work on the new marketing information database, and she had invited me to attend their project conclusion meeting. The project finished three weeks behind schedule and was over budget by 15 percent—not terrible numbers, but an interesting discussion ensued as to the cause of these overruns and how they could have been avoided. Ashley began the meet- ing by congratulating the team on a job well done. “First off, my sincerest thanks to all of you for working so hard on this project. You all did a wonderful job, and you should feel proud of your work and our accomplishment. Of course, as with any project, we did encounter a few problems. That’s the purpose for our meeting this morning. Knowing what we know today, what could we have done dif- ferently on the project to hit our deadline and budget?” Chris, one of the database administrators, spoke up. “For the first half of the project, everything seemed to go according to schedule. But some of the design decisions we made up front didn’t pan out like we hoped and caused us rework delays later on.” “That’s a good point,” Ashley noted. “The design work is critical on a project deploying new technology. For a project like this, that type of work should have been on the critical path.” “I think we also lost some focus toward the middle of the project,” Di- ane contributed. “As we started to create the physical database, we were heading into the holiday season. I think things started to slip at that point.” “You’re right,” Ashley agreed, nodding. “It’s imperative to maintain work focus around the holidays. If I had to do it again, I would have added some of those activities to the critical path as well.” “Another thing I noticed,” Ashley continued diplomatically, “was I had problems understanding some aspects of the project management tool we were using. About halfway through the project, I was looking at the project’s critical path. The tool was cluttering the critical path with lots of unimportant activities. Other longer and more important activities were not on the path. Next time I run a project, I am going to move the Lessons in Project Management 107 more important activities onto the critical path, so I can place the prop- er amount of management focus on them.” I decided at this point to put on my coach’s hat. The discussion on key learning from the project was a good one, but I didn’t want them to en- counter other problems on their next project because of faulty under- standing of the critical path. LESSON Before I discuss the critical path, I’ll clarify the definition of schedule float. Float, or slack, refers to a time lag that can occur between two activities without impacting the final deadline. For instance, let’s say you have two ac- tivities—A and B. Activity B must start after activity A has finished. If activity B must start right away, there is zero slack. However, if activity B can start two days after activity A finishes without impacting the overall deadline date, then activity B has two days of slack. This does not mean activity B must wait two days. However, if necessary, activity B could wait up to two days without impacting the overall project deadline. With that in mind, let’s look at the critical path. Critical path is the name giv- en to the sequence of activities from start to finish that must be started and completed on time for the entire project to complete on time. There is no float for any activity on the path. Every project has a critical path of ac- tivities, and the project end date is based on the length of time to complete the tasks on the critical path. For example, imagine a project takes 300 days. The critical path might con- sist of a sequence of 40 activities that would also take 300 days to complete. If the first activity on the critical path is 1 day late, the project will take 301 days to complete, unless another activity on the critical path can be com- pleted 1 day earlier. It is vital the project manager understands the critical path and pays special attention to these activities, since any delay on the critical path will result in a delay in the entire project. If your project is behind schedule, you must ac- celerate activities on the critical path to get back on schedule. If the project is behind schedule and the project manager is not aware of the critical path and how it drives the project end date, it’s l ...