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Project Scheduling

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Project Scheduling

When the critical path that the project is scheduled to take takes longer than the sponsor, and senior stakeholders expect, the project team should immediately start resource planning. The resources available should be examined and reorganized to ensure that they can fully meet the needs of the extended project. Besides, the milestones should be defined and effectively acknowledged. Certainly, in this situation, crashing will be the appropriate technique to employ (Herroelen & Leus, 2005). The reason behind this is that in crashing, resources will be added so that they speed up the various activities or rather the processes. This will make it possible to achieve the results which could otherwise be achieved after a long time in a relatively lesser time. For the case of fast-tracking, even though speed will be increased in the processes, the results stand a chance of being compromised.

Apparently, fast-tracking is always adopted first when there is the need for time reduction when it comes to project execution. The technique ensures that different events are conducted simultaneously, and this helps save time. However, the technique has a limitation in that it can only be achieved under some limits but when the limits are exceeded. For instance, the project team will have to be patients until the concrete dries up before the next step which is painting starts. Crashing, on the other hand, has an advantage of significantly reducing the total time and applies to most projects (Merkle, Middendorf & Schmeck, 2002). This technique is not limited to the processes like fast-tracking. This technique’s main risk is that it tends to consume more resources and therefore may cause profound losses to the project. The main risk associated with fast-tracking is the fact that when it is applied in processes where the limits have already been met, it can cause more problems to the entire problem such as the destruction of the entire project. For the case of fast-tracking, when done beyond some level, it may end up consuming high amounts of monetary resources thereby causing immense problems to the entire project.

References

Herroelen, W., & Leus, R. (2005). Project scheduling under uncertainty: Survey and research potentials. European journal of operational research, 165(2), 289-306.

Merkle, D., Middendorf, M., & Schmeck, H. (2002). Ant colony optimization for resource-constrained project scheduling. IEEE transactions on evolutionary computation, 6(4), 333-346.