Operations management concepts and applications

Critical Path

The author of this response is asked to look at a project management scenario. There are two questions posed with that scenario that the author of this response is expected to answer. The first question is what the critical path is for RockFest and how long the project will take given the paths involved. The second question asks the author what activities the author of crash if step B ends up taking five weeks instead of the currently projected three weeks.

Questions Answered

The critical path of the project is A-B-D-E-F-G-O. The duration of the project under that critical path would be 34 weeks. There are other project arcs that are fairly close to the critical path in terms of length, but the one listed above is at least four weeks longer than all of the others. The second closest project arc is A-B-P, which comes to 30 weeks. A-T-U-X is 27 weeks, A-B-H-I-J is 28 weeks and A-B-D-L-m is 26 weeks. Everything else is 22 weeks or less. As long as the critical path does not lag, the overall project should take a tad less than eight months.

The other question asks the author what can or should be crashed if step B takes five weeks instead of three. Since B. is in the critical path, as noted above, this would cause the project to from 34 weeks to 36 weeks if nothing is done to compensate. Obviously, if B. lags too long, something after (or before) that in the critical path would have to be shortened by 2 weeks to compensate.

Crashing step A is a non-starter since one cannot have a concert without a site finalized. The event not go on if the site is not completely in order. The author of this report will come back to the website (step D) in just a second. The TV deal really needs to be in order so step E is not really optional. Step F has to happen since having a director is not optional. Step G is also needed since the cameras for the TV deal and production have to be in order. Passes and stage credentials are also a must for security and management purposes.

This clearly leaves step D as the way to get back the lost two weeks of time since the crash time for step D is three weeks whereas the normal time is five weeks. The other critical paths steps all feed off one another and none of them can really be abandoned, at least not with the ease and speed in which it can be done for the website. There are other ways to promote a site online rather than doing a dedicate site so shaving those two weeks would obviously be the best approach as compared to anything else on the critical path. No other paths would have to be messed with since the closest other path is four weeks less than the 34 weeks of the critical path.

Forsaking the television arc would be an extremely bad idea because that is obviously such a major linchpin of the concert and the plan behind it whereas the absence of a website or a website that is scaled down significantly can much more easily be overcome than the television arrangements not being in order. In short, if one of those 3-4 television-related steps was crashed they might as well all be crashed and that is not necessary since the two weeks lost on step B can be recovered from the website step.