Can you have two critical paths

Driving these complex efforts to a successful completion requires a cohesive methodology that delivers the necessary insight, while also providing the tools to act quickly and effectively.

Robust project controls are a vital component when managing multiple critical paths. The right project management methodology will enable the team to identify problem areas early. Communication is another key to sustaining the right level of connection across all of the important paths that are part of the project.

Information sharing should be a focus as the Project Team works to balance the needs of the critical path alongside those of the secondary and tertiary paths.

Data must flow from the project team up to the executives to ensure everyone is aware of progress and issues. It will also need to be channeled from the leadership group down to the center of excellence. This may be in the form of strategic direction that influences project decisions or activity scheduling, or input to help resolve problems so the project can move forward.

All rights reserved. Legal Sitemap Contact. Get in Touch with us Contact Us. Why wait for your next strategic project to fall behind? The risks behind multiple critical paths One risk often encountered when executing projects with more than one critical path is the potential for tasks outside the primary path to be neglected.

Tips to successfully manage multiple critical paths Driving these complex efforts to a successful completion requires a cohesive methodology that delivers the necessary insight, while also providing the tools to act quickly and effectively. Quick Contact. In Project , a critical task has zero days of slack float. However, you can change this default value and define a task as critical that has, for example, one or two days of slack.

On the Tools menu, choose Options , and then select the Calculation tab. In the Tasks are critical if slack is less than or equal to box, enter the maximum amount of slack, in days, that you want to use to define critical tasks. If you want this value to be the default value for all of your projects, choose Set as Default. To learn how to find a task's slack, see Show slack in your project. For instructions about changing a task's slack, see Set lead or lag time float between tasks.

Tip: To change the sensitivity of critical tasks, on the Tools menu, choose Options. On the Calculation tab, under Tasks are critical if slack is less than or equal to , specify the number of days under which a task will be considered critical.

In your project, select Timeline. Select Filters. Turn on the toggle Show Critical Path. When Show Critical Path is on, you'll see the critical path for your project highlighted red in the timeline. Manage your project's critical path. View and track scheduling factors. Show the critical path of your project in Project. Show the critical path in the Gantt Chart view The Gantt Chart view will likely be your most used view for showing the critical path. Tasks on the critical path now have red Gantt bars.

Show the critical path in other task views You can see the critical path in any task view by highlighting it. These instructions are specific to Project Display the critical path for your project To verify that adjustments that you make to the project plan don't adversely affect the critical path, you can review the critical path and critical tasks in any of several ways.

In Project for the web, you can view the critical path by using a filter. Need more help? Expand your skills. Get new features first. Was this information helpful?

Yes No. Thank you! Any more feedback? The more you tell us the more we can help. Can you help us improve? Resolved my issue. Clear instructions. Easy to follow. No jargon. Pictures helped. Didn't match my screen. Incorrect instructions. It also allows users to automatically add activities to existing filters by simply selecting them. The combination of these two features allows users to manually construct a filtered view of the critical path to any completion milestone by simply clicking backward through the driving relationships.

The first step is to construct a custom filter to isolate the completion milestone of interest. Here we are focusing on the Phase 1 completion milestone.

Next, the chain of driving activities i. Here is the view after taking the first backward step. Here is the view after tracing the network all the way back to the first driving relationship. This is the driving i. This click-tracing technique can become tedious when the project schedule is complex and there are numerous branches to the logic paths. For example, if an activity along the driving path has two driving predecessors, then the analyst must make a note to return to the second one after the first is fully explored.

This option effectively automates the click-tracing technique. Float Path number 1 identifies the first driving path. Higher Float Path numbers identify any parallel driving paths and near-driving paths. Like the click-tracing technique, Multiple-Float Path analysis works without modifying the schedule network, so reversing temporary changes is not a concern prior to sharing the schedule.

The user can then manually enter a code like the custom flag fields shown above to mark the highlighted tasks. It is fairly straightforward to automate the generation of a task path filter using a macro, and some macro snippets have been published. Those issues are discussed in my other blog entry here. The chart below shows driving and near-driving paths to Phase 1 completion — depicted by altering the bar chart. The driving path is indicated by dark red bars with the zero indicating zero relative float.

Consistent with the trailing-dummy results, the two non-driving tasks that are part of Phase 1 are depicted as having 2 days and 3 days, respectively, of float relative to the Phase 1 completion milestone.

That is, they could slip 2 or 3 days before affecting the milestone. Similar depictions of the driving and near-driving paths for the other five phases, and for the project as a whole, are made possible with a few clicks. Since the schedule network is not manipulated in any way, Total Slack remains unchanged, and there is no need to reverse any analysis-based modifications prior to sharing the data file. Some experts have suggested using open-ended logic along with a built-in software calculation setting to automatically mark multiple critical paths.

The proposal is as follows:. Effectively, this is the same as assigning a deadline to each completion milestone at a date that exactly equals its early finish date — an example of which was already explored above. It is subject to the same drawbacks of that approach, but with none of the advantages. If there are intersecting logic paths between phases as shown in the example , then which activities are driving which milestone cannot be determined based on total float alone.

One merely sees a bunch of zero-float activities in all the phases. Excellent article, Tom. I always enjoy your thoughtful writings. I devoted substantial to this in both of my books. Kudos for clarifying a greatly misunderstood point. Thanks, Murray. The concept achieves two needed innovations. First, as you discussed, it recognizes that, for each mandatory deadline imposed on a CPM schedule, there are one or more driving paths. Second, though, the concept criticizes Total Float or, Slack, in MSP parlance as a comparative value, thus an unstable one.

Hence, the instability. To correct this exhausting, counter-productive, and often project-delaying management reaction, ICS-Research conceived of a set of quantitative measures and corresponding terms. Likewise, in healthcare, there are rigid definitions of stable, critical, intensive care, acute, terminal, etc.

One does not STOP being terminal because someone else, also terminal, has a shorter period of time left on earth. Now, if we have a table that associates a label e. Finally, as you and I both know, virtually every imposed deadline has more than one path feeding into it. Using the Path Ranking System, one can label each path. Informed by this, we can now establish FOUR new pieces of information about that Deadline, One, the number of paths feeding into it.

Two, the Ranking of each path. Three, the Average of the Path Rankings.