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Paving the Critical Path
By accepting resource insufficiencies when assembling their plans, project managers blur the costs of the resulting inefficiencies. But by optimizing the critical path schedule, they can capture the impact on project profit of delays caused by resource bottlenecks — and at least make a more persuasive, bottomline case for hiring vital resources for future projects.
This is the sixth article in a series exploring, summarizing and expanding on the techniques, metrics and implications of a methodology called Total Project Control (TPC), which focuses on managing and demonstrating project value.
In Part V of this series, we discussed how to use the metric DRAG and its corollary DRAG Cost to optimize a critical path schedule. We suggested that, in the initial CPM analysis and optimization process, we limit delay factors as much as possible to those caused by the logic of the work — you can’t proofread the manual until you write it. Of course, it’s impossible to completely factor out issues such as resource levels and risk mitigation/acceptance. But as much as possible, we should be seeking to discover how quickly we could get the project done if such factors were minimized.
As we optimized the CPM schedule, we should have been doing so with an eye on project profit and the DIPP, as discussed in the first few articles in the series. …
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