Project Management -- Network Planning Techniques Essay

Project Management -- Network Planning Techniques - Essay Example The critical path enables the manager to decide in what sequence a set of activities will be performed and when they should start and be completed. By knowing which tasks are non-critical the manager is better able to reconcile his project with his resource constraints. Another major advantage of using the critical path method is that the manager is able to perform â€Å"what if† exercises. If the start date of the project (a, 0) has been fixed as Tuesday January 4th, 2011 and assuming that work is done only on Monday through Friday with no holidays, the earliest projected calendar finish date of the project is June 24th, 2011. By default, all critical tasks have zero slack. The task with the largest free slack occurs at node L, which is GFE delivery. The manager could use the slack to manage scope creep, to monitor and update his schedule and to revise his risk assessment. From our critical path diagram it is evident that dates for delivery of the engine and for the GFE payload are non-critical, therefore we shall set the date of delivery for both to be March 30th, 2011 because any date before vehicle integration begins on April 1st, 2011 will suffice. The critical path remains the same but completion date is pushed forward to June 28th, 2011 because total number of days needed to complete the project increases from 124 to 128. We also notice that the slack days also go up. The impact of this change will have to be reflected with a revision of project