Why I need to understand the concept and know how to calculate the project critical path?

In this podcast, Ricardo talks about the project critical path and explains that the use of software to calculate the critical path, causes the manager to forget the basics and concepts of project management. Ricardo also explains that the critical path consists of the activities that directly determine the duration of the project and these activities are not necessarily more expensive or riskier in the project.

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Episode transcript

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Everybody welcome to the five minutes PM guest Today. I like to discuss one thing that sometimes worries me is the critical path concept. A lot of people thinks that what is the critical path? All the critical path is the path containing their activities. That becomes a rant. When I press this button in my project management software wrong, this war is me a lot because a lot of people thinks that the use of technology can replace knowledge and mathematics and the understanding of the critical path.

This is a problem. This is a big problem. Most of the project managers that I know now, don't know how to do the critical path calculation by hand. First of all, what is the critical path? The critical path is the path of containing all the tasks that are critical in time. I'm not talking about the most expensive tasks. I'm not talking about the most quality driven tasks.

No, I'm talking about time. I'm talking about the task and the path that contains zero float zero Zack. So you cannot delay these tasks, or if you have more than one path, the path with less float, less float. So this is such an important understanding of why we worried a lot, the critical path.

It's only because this breath will be rapidly driving the project duration. And if you delay one of the tasks inside the critical path, and let's suppose that you cannot solve this in future desks, that you cannot recover this delay in future tasks. This means that if you delay one task one day, one task and the critical path one day, and you cannot recover those in the future, directly means to me, yes, that your project will delay or one day in the other hand to recovery and save time in the critical path task doesn't mean that you will recover your time in the project, because if you let's suppose that you save one day in one critical task, maybe the same critical path can change and you will not save this because this one day we can see another task may be, we were at zero floats.

That will be now critical for the project. So this concept of critical paths changes every time that you change durations, starting date and finished state, and its, it's not hard to do this by hand. It's not hard. One we need to do is we need to add or the duration of each desk from the beginning to the end. And when we have two tasks convergent into a third one, the tasks that will carry the largest duration from the beginning of the project will move forward to this next task.

This is that fast forward pass. The backward pass will start from the finish and we'll reduce all the durations up to turn into zero. At the beginning of the project, the task is with the first stop. At the same as the second top, they will be considered the critical tasks. There are many, it's impossible for me in five minutes to explain how to do these two steps, but you can find on the web many, many articles and tutorials to teach you that.

What do I want to share with you is that you must understand. This is a very simple calculation. If you understand that you will understand the roots of Katelyn management. And with that, you will understand how all the software will calculate the critical path back press in that single button that I started this podcast, what really worries me is that there it's pointless to try to understand the spreadsheet.

If you don't know mathematics, it's pointless to press the red or the blue button to show the critical path. If you do not understand how to do this by hand, this is the most important thing that I want to share with you. So now, if you are struggling to do this by hand, go to the web, find articles, explaining how to do this and practice.

Take one example to three 10 examples until you understand everything after that, you can easily return back to the softer because now you will know the routes of this calculation in this will make a huge difference on all your understanding about project scandal. I hope you enjoy this podcast. See you next week with another five minutes PM. Podcast bye.

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