Crashing The Schedule
As a project manager, I’m occasionally presented with the challenge of compressing work into a tight timeline. Sometimes this is the result of the customer (business) of wanting results sooner, and other times it’s because there is an external deadline that cannot be moved. In either case, the scheduled activities are reviewed to identify opportunities for parallel effort. In PM parlance, attempting to get more done sooner is often called “crashing” the schedule; a degree of caution is advised when considering this approach. Because most projects involved a fixed pool of resources, this can result in over-allocating individuals (overtime / long hours) and there are well-understood diminishing return curves for demanding extra effort.
Whenever possible I attempt to negotiate the schedule with the project sponsor, but I’m finding it fairly common to be called in for projects where a delivery date has already been communicated to the customer. This means working backwards by building the task schedule from the end milestone. Tasks are identified for possible overlap and the critical path is shortened as much as possible. Crashing the schedule is usually identified as a risk, although I’d be tempted to say it is a mitigation plan undertaken in response to an issue. Call it what you like… getting more done with less resources in less time… everybody loves that idea and many PMs find themselves being expected to make this happen on a regular basis. I suspect the nature of our industry is that we’ll need to introduce greater training for optimization into the PMI knowledge areas.