Anticlue

Managing the Critical Path

A couple of tips to managing the critical path of a project:

• Determine and group the risk to the critical path such as cash flow rate, skills inventory, flawed deliverables, configuration management and change management.


• Establish a proactive process to manage the constraints on the critical path, this helps to ensure resources, materials, and facilities are available when needed on the project. Identify which critical path the constraint affects, there may be many, and remember to prioritize the constraints


• Ensure that the skills needed for the critical path are available, if not set up a knowledge sharing process.


• Any critical path risk should be in the risk management plan and risk log with the appropriate allevaition pattern


• Establish a communication channel and schedule to handle the management of the critical path


• Manage the critical path timeline, so that any slack time can be utilized. In other works, move it up the chain if at all possible so everything isn't waiting for the last minute.