Total Floats: with or without project deadlines

One of the greatest advantages of the critical path method is the ability to understand the available contingency for each activity in the project. However, the contingencies could be calculated with and without project deadlines. For effective project planning and control, it is important to know both perspectives.

Popular scheduling tools have different features to manage project deadlines that impact the calculation of critical paths and Total Floats.
Spider Project provides both metrics simultaneously.
Primavera and Microsoft Project users have to decide which perspective is more important for them.

With proposed workarounds, users can have an additional Critical Path metric: Total Float Deadline and understand both perspectives simultaneously!
The additional metric is important for effective project control and forensic analysis.

Hi Gary,

Firstly , you should establish your WBS which is in line with the phases of your project. If you have contractual completion dates for each phase, these should be added to your schedule as constraints. Adding these constraints in your schedule will lead to development of multiple critical paths in your schedule. Each critical path should be paid attention and tracked if your completion dates for these phases are contractual milestones. Regardless of number of critical paths on your schedule, you will only have one longest path in your work schedule which will have an impact on the latest completion date of your project in case of a delay. In summary, you will have multiple critical paths and one longest path in your project to be monitored. 

Best regards,