Chapter 16: Critical Path Monitoring and Advanced Techniques

A project in execution is often under several forms of external and internal pressure, which can derail it. These include scope creep, inflationary costs, competing resource commitments, risks, issues, and quality concerns. These factors can ultimately cause schedule slippage, budget overrun, resource overallocation, and quality issues. The project manager should use different monitoring and control techniques to minimize the impact of these factors on the schedule.

Critical Path Method (CPM) is the scheduling methodology of choice used in Project. A robust understanding of the CPM empowers the project manager to absorb and dampen the impact of external and internal pressures, as we will investigate in this chapter. Furthermore, we will also revisit the topic of overallocation, looking at some advanced features provided by Project with the aid of practical exercises.

In this chapter, we are going to cover the following...