I am now facing a problem in squeezing my project. My programe have over 4000 thousand activities and some activities have over 10 predecessors or successors. The programme have multiple critical paths. There are so many combination in squeezing the critical activities. I have to squeeze individual activities at the same time in all the crtical paths in order to achieve reduction of duration. Even I used the driven indicator, but it could not list out all the driven tasks.
How could I identify how many critical paths are there before I could know how many activities I have to squeeze at the same time?
I do not have a license of P6 therefore cannot be of help here, I will not be able to give you the details to look for the parallel critical paths.
Nevertheless I would warn you that while MS Project does not attempt to calculate resource critical floats P6 attempts in frequent occasions fails and yield wrong values. I tried a very simple job with a colleague using P6 and it yielded zero total float for some activities while it displayed some free float. This zero total float makes it obvious that displayed free float is wrong but what when total float is not zero but reduced by resource leveling and free float is wrong?
I understand that P6 longest path under resource leveling stops the search when activities in the path are delayed by the resource leveling algorithm, therefore it might be somewhat limited. If using P6 I would not trust float values and would try to make best use of longest path.
Many times the best way to start crashing a schedule is by using a software that has good resource leveling algorithms it will yield a shorter schedule than others without need to crash activities. At other times the best way to get back in time a job is not by crashing activities but by making more resources available, manpower and equipment, or by use of shifts. Here again MS Project and P6 are very bad at resource leveling as well as with the handling of shifts, especially when you do not know how much work is to be done by each shift.
At home when a job start getting delayed we recover time simply by adding a weekends shifts, usually Saturdays is enough. We plan for a five days week and use weekends as our buffer if there is no condition that does not allow us to work on week ends.
As you can see crashing a schedule by an algorithm that optimizes which activities to crash usually misses the point by a wide margin. All those attempts to crash a schedule using time-cost trade offs have been abandoned decades ago. Solving real scheduling problems is not that simple.
Dear mukunda y and Rafael Davila
Dear,
It is easy to do in primavera, bit combersome to do in microsoft project, can be done.
Highlight Critical Paths in red is one option another is to filter for critical activities. Descriptive network diagrams can also be useful.
The problem is that MS Project under resource leveling yields wrong float values and might leave resource critical activities out, this can even misled you into believing these activities might be delayed as wrong float is displayed.
http://www.projectlearning.net/pdf/C2.1.pdf
Dear,
Could anyone help to reply to my query?
Many thanks!!!