Techniques to shorten the project

The project manager is often asked to deliver a project quicker than it will actually take to finish the project. At other times, there are delays, and the project manager must find ways to compress the schedule and recover from the slippage. Fortunately, there are some well-understood techniques of project management that can be applied to compress the schedule. It must be understood that all such compression techniques will incur an extra cost to the project, directly or indirectly. Furthermore, all schedule compression techniques will revolve around the concept of the critical path, and we will discuss three techniques briefly in the following sections.

Shortening the critical path (crashing the project)

Since the critical path determines the duration of the project, shortening the critical path will result in an earlier project finish date. This technique is commonly called crashing a project. To achieve this result, we can consider all...