From the course: Project Management Foundations: Schedules

Pay more to shorten a schedule - Microsoft Project Tutorial

From the course: Project Management Foundations: Schedules

Pay more to shorten a schedule

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- [Instructor] If the project finish date is more important than the budget, spending money to shorten the schedule is an option. It's called crashing. The most common crashing technique is adding more resources to an activity. This approach is effective, up to a point. If you add too many resources, work starts to slow down as people get in each other's way. Other options for crashing include paying overtime, paying fees for expedited delivery, or paying more for people who can complete work quicker. Like any technique for shortening the schedule, the tasks you want to crash are on the critical path because they're the ones that directly determine the finish date of the project. Crashing can increase the risk for tasks. For instance, when you hire unfamiliar workers. That's why it's good to keep the number of crash tasks to a minimum. Crashing part of one long task might cut all the time you need out of the schedule. By crashing longer tasks, you don't have to crash as many of them. After you have crashing candidates, evaluate those tasks to find the ones that are most cost-effective to crash. The trick is to find the tasks that offer the lowest cost for each week they shorten the project schedule. Let's look at how this works using the sample project. Suppose the stakeholders say the project needs to finish one week earlier. The first step is to find the longest tasks on the critical path. Here's a list of the tasks in our sample project with durations longer than one week. The next step is figuring out the most cost-effective tasks to crash. That means estimating how much each candidate can be shortened and how much it will cost to do that. From that, you can calculate how much it costs to crash per day. The crash table shows crash info for several candidates from the sample project. They're sorted by cost per week so you can pick the most cost-effective. In this case, the two editing tasks can each shorten the schedule by one week for $1,500. That's a deal! So let's see what happens to the schedule when we crash one of the editing tasks. The training guide is initially scheduled to be published September 11th. After shortening the initial edit task by one week, the guide is published on September 4th with an additional cost of $1,500. If the project still needs to be shorter, repeat these steps, starting with re-examining the critical path. That's because the next activity to crash has to be on the critical path to shorten the overall schedule. If the finish date is more important than the price tag, crashing tasks is an effective way to shorten the schedule.

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