From the course: Project Management Foundations

How to shorten a schedule

From the course: Project Management Foundations

How to shorten a schedule

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- [Instructor] Stakeholders can be an inpatient bunch. You estimate when the project will finish and more often than not, they ask if you can deliver it sooner. Or maybe your project gets delayed and you need to make up time. Let's look at a few techniques for shortening the project schedule. Fast tracking means you overlap tasks that normally occur one after the other. Let's say you want to finish design more quickly. You can have some folks start designing software features before the system design is complete. Fast tracking is simple. You just add an overlap to two tasks with finish to start dependencies. The best tasks to fast track are the longest tasks on the critical path. Remember, you shorten the whole project when you shorten the critical path. Fast Tracking the longest tasks on the critical path shortens the schedule and also introduces the fewest number of risks and changes which brings us to the disadvantage of fast tracking. It increases risk. For example, changes to the system design could result in redoing work on the software design. The second technique, crashing, means you spend additional money to shorten the schedule, like paying for more people or expedited delivery of key materials. The critical path is still the place to look for tasks to crash. Think about it. Why would you spend money to shorten tasks if they aren't going to shorten your schedule? You also want the alternative that shortens the schedule, the amount you need for the least amount of money. Start with the least expensive tasks to crash and move on to tasks with higher price tags. Remember, you crash tasks only until you've shortened the schedule by the amount you need. A crash table makes it easy to see which tasks to crash. It shows the cost to crash each critical task and the duration you eliminate by crashing them. Choose the tasks with the lowest crash cost per week. If they have the same crash cost per week, crash the longer ones first. That way you crash the fewest tasks. You can take crashing only so far. At some point, adding more people won't shorten the duration because people start getting in each other's way and on each other's nerves. New people take time to get up to speed and they can slow down existing team members who have to help them get oriented. Keep in mind you review the critical path after every adjustment. An adjustment could change the critical path. You want to make sure the next task you work on is still on it. The third method for shortening a schedule is to cut project scope. If the tasks for deleted scope are on the critical path, cutting scope shortens the schedule. Fast tracking, crashing and cutting scope help shorten the project schedule. Each has its pros and cons so choose the method that makes the most sense for the project at hand. Look at the schedule in the exercise files. What techniques would you use to shorten the scheduling project and which tasks might be involved?

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