Use of a Critical Path Method - Essay Example

With the help of this CPM, a manager can easily see the overall progress and which operations are to be crashed to complete a project in time. The total duration of the project is a sum of operations durations on the Critical path. The critical path is the sequence of activities which add up to the longest overall duration. An additional parallel path through the network with a total duration shorter than the critical path is called a sub-critical or non-critical path (“Critical Path Method”, 2011).

In the case of Rockfest, the critical path is found using MS Project, Figure 1. In the first column, there is the description of the operation, and in the second, the duration of the operation. There is a Ganth diagram on the scheme with the red-marked critical path. Therefore, the overall duration of the project should be 23 weeks (the critical path duration).

Crashing a project means shortening some operations to fulfil the project’s time requirements. If activity B (Selection of local printer) would take 5 weeks instead of the planned 3 weeks we must crash some operations because activity B is on the Critical Path. The crashing time should be 5-3=2 weeks. For crashing a project we must find the Crash cost per period and Critical path. I have used MS Excel to find Crash cost per period, Table 1. There is a formula to find the indicator: Crash cost per period=(Normal cost-Crash cost)/(Normal time-Crash time). It shows which operation’s week is the cheapest to crash. To shorten the overall duration of the project, we must first crash critical path operations. From Table 1, see that Crash cost per period is the lowest in operations B - $300 and F - $500. There is no any information about the Crash time and cost of lengthened operation B. There is an assumption that the operation’s Crash and Normal time difference stays the same – 1 week and prices stay stable. Therefore, we can crash operations B and F to achieve the original duration of 23 weeks.

After crashing a project I have faced another problem. There are two critical patches now, Figure 2. This means that a manager must care about two operations at the same time to make a project on time. This kind of problem might occur in any project with many sub-critical patches.

Consequently, I have identified a critical path of RockFest and found the duration of the project. In the second part, I faced the problem of crashing the project. To do this some indicators were found such as Crash Cost per period and Critical path. The next step was identifying the cheapest operations to crash. Finally, I have found that the crashed Rockfest project has two critical parts. Besides, I discovered that using MS Project is very helpful in planning this kind of project. It helps to put many tasks on one page.