After putting a lot of effort into project planning, suddenly you observed that one of your tasks took much longer than expected and during that time a new assignment pop-up.
Also, in such a situation one of the important team members took leave for a few days.
Source: Projectmanager
But you shouldn’t let those events frustrate you, with the Critical Path analysis you can address all these issues.
“A project without a critical path is like a ship without a rudder.” — D. Meyer, Illinois Construction Law
If something comes in the team’s way, you can look for the alterations without causing any delay in the milestones or missing any deadlines.
What is a critical path in Project Management?
A critical analysis is a method of project management.
It creates the shortest timeline for your project, looking at the tasks needed to complete the deliverables, along with the estimated time needed for each step, dependency of the task, and the final milestones.
It is a methodology planned to handle your project in an intelligent way.
With a Critical path, you get the idea about the tasks which can be a reason for the project fall.
Source: Planacademy
It will show you the timeline of the Gantt chart, and the task in the critical path turns red. The tasks that are not on the critical path remain in their original color.
“No matter how good the team or how efficient the methodology, if we’re not solving the right problem, the project fails.” – Woody Williams
How do you find the Critical Path?
It’s time to find the critical path in your projects, but how?
To help you identify the critical path in your projects here is a step by step description:
1. Outline the Project scope
As you start finding your critical path, you need to break down what’s involved in the projects.
Breakdown the project structure into:
- Identify the task: Figure out the details of the project, have a discussion with the stakeholders, and identify the tasks that are necessary for the project.
- Put the task in order: As you get the idea about the task that needs to be included in the project. The next thing you need to do is put them in order. This will help to identify the dependent task.
- Duration for task: To find out the critical path in your project, you need to figure a duration for each task. This will help to identify the longest path.
2. Identify the potential path
After identifying the project scope, it’s time to know the paths and strings. A project holds many connected and dependency tasks. So you need to identify these tasks.
3. Identify the critical path
To find out the critical path, you need to identify the task with the longest sequence. The longest sequence in your project management is the critical path in your project.
Can the Critical Path change During the Project?
A project has many series of interrelated tasks. The team tries to complete the tasks, so as to reduce the stress of critical paths.
The development in the project reduces the critical path in a task or it might bring a new critical path in your task. So, the critical path in the task changes with the development of the projects.
The project scope either reduces or you might need to assign more people to your task. You can get more than one critical path in a task. It usually changes with the progress in the work.
How can a Critical Path help in Project Management?
In the present era, we handle many important projects. These projects are not easy to handle. It needs a lot of planning and execution.
