Question

How might a project manager (PM) treat project A and B differently?

Project A: Several critical paths, virtually no slack

Project B: Single critical path; several activities with a lot of slack

Answer 1

Critical path method (CPM), is used to determine the project completion time, with a forward and backward pass, considering the duration, dependencies and additional relationship between activities. It helps to determine critical path Activities and their impact on the completion time.

When a manager has the following situation;

A) several critical path, virtually no slack:

He can't delay any of the activities, unless the crashing changes the time of completion and impact on other activities. There should be more than one unit of time crashed, by crashing more than one activity, which results in increased costs. The manager deals with such a high sensitive project, with appropriate resources, and try to keep the activities within the scope limit. Though it is very challenging, but such critical path needs to be managed very effectively.

B) single critical path, several activities with a lot of slack.

When a project network have single critical path, it is not very sensitive, and has various activities with slack values. This helps the managers to delay the project based on the slack values of each activity and to decide which critical path activities needs to be crashed further, without impacting other activities. Crashing may lead to more than one critical path, making the project sensitive therefore, the time, resources and impact of compression must be determined by the manager in order to make decisions for the completion time.

(Please like the answer it will encourage me.)