The critical path is an effective work visualization tool. Here’s how to create – and update – one automatically.
The critical path is a powerful project management tool. When built carefully, it is a glimpse into a project’s future that calls out bottlenecks and problems long before they delay your deliverables. Even the process of setting up the critical path can help you accurately scope and price projects and set reasonable expectations with clients for project completion dates.
The problem? Creating a critical path requires project management skills, time, and math. And whenever something in the project changes, you must recalculate everything. That’s a lot of work.
That’s where Moovila Perfect Project does the heavy lifting of helping create and monitor the critical path for you, allowing you to easily automate the timeline for every one of your projects. It enables teams, even those with little or no project management training, to quickly implement and monitor this powerful work management visualization.
Better timeline accuracy
When done well a critical path view shows you every step of a project, from start to finish. The start date for the project, the dates for every task, all dependencies in the project, and the forecasted completion date are drawn in a clear visual. There is no estimating or guessing the completion date once you build the critical path. The dates and deadlines are based on real data. The better your data, the more accurate the timeline will be.
Perfect Project has an AI at its heart called the critical path engine. It does all the math and plotting required to calculate a critical path. Then it monitors the project as it unfolds, noting when tasks are completed – and when they aren’t – and recalculating when necessary.
When you build a project, you estimate the duration for each task, decide which tasks are dependent on others, and if there are dates – deliveries, on site work, etc. – that can’t be moved.
Using your criteria, the critical path engine determines when each task will start and end, and calculates the entire length of the project, and finds the earliest possible delivery date. You can adjust the start date as needed to get a completion date that works.
Because the critical path engine can view your other projects across the portfolio and review your team’s capacity, this is a timeline you can trust. You don’t have to guesstimate how this new project will impact your portfolio or the workload of your team.
Better status updates & control for the project manager
In a perfect world, a project would play out exactly as planned – especially when you take the time to calculate it with precision and build a critical path. It’s, unfortunately, extremely rare that a project unfolds without some sort of delay, schedule change, late work, or unexpected issues, though. This reality is another reason that maintaining a critical path manually is an onerous job. It must be recalculated for every change.
The critical path engine is an AI, though. It does this work willingly and instantly. It watches the project with the speed and vigilance only a machine intelligence can deliver. When it notices a task hasn’t been completed by its deadline, it recalculates the entire timeline to reflect how serious a problem this missed task is. Perfect Project pulls schedule data from other systems, like your PSA, as well as the calendars of everyone on your team, so it knows everyone’s work capacity. The critical path and forecasted date are real predictors of how well your projects are going.
The critical path engine is also smart enough to see when a missed task is non-critical. Perhaps you have allotted a three-day duration for a task that requires three hours of budgeted work. When the critical path notes this task isn’t completed, it considers how serious a problem that creates for the overall timeline. In some cases, it might deliver a mild warning or, if the task is critical and other tasks depend on it, it might flag the situation as dire, informing you that your completion date is at risk.
Customers love accurate predictions and kept promises
When you consistently deliver projects when you promised them – and rarely need to renegotiate deadlines or costs – customers are thrilled. To the client, this seems like a baseline expectation. But, when you manage a portfolio of complex projects, you know that it is a complicated challenge.
With Perfect Project’s critical path engine in your corner, you can easily make intelligent estimates about delivery dates when you build projects. And whenever something changes, quickly calculate the impact on that delivery date. This allows you to alert customers well in advance of delays. If the customer is the cause of a delay, it is easy and fast to give specific warnings about how that delay will change the cost or timeline.
This level of intelligence is difficult to achieve even if you have a team of project managers at your PMO. With Perfect Project and its ability to automate timeline tracking, your team can handle it on their own.
To learn more about Perfect Project’s critical path engine by visiting: www.moovila.com/critical-path-engine
