Project Managers, Essay Example

In project management project managers are usually confronted with the task of changing the schedule to reduce the time of completion in order to meet the project’s deadline. The duration of the project can usually be reduced by assigning more resources and labor to the activities. With the increase in labor and resources in the increase of the cost of the project. Due to unavoidable risk in the project, the project may get behind schedule. The time of completion first given is to optimistic that certain realities will not derail the project. In other situations,  the market or the company that is requesting the project needs it earlier than expected, and the project must be sped up to meet the demands. In the event that penalties for a late project are typically too high, and the cost of reputation are too high a solution is needed to circumvent these projects.

Project crashing is the useful method of reducing the time of the critical project activities to a more normal time in order to shorten the duration of the project. Project managers uses this project schedule compression technique in order to reduce the minimal addition costs and resources of the duration of the project. In a certain project as the project manager, it was required for me to crash the project in order to complete the project on time. In order to crash the project it was crucial to also minimize the cost of crashing by reducing the project duration. The use of additional resources was used in order to get the activities done at a faster time. The additional resources helped to reduce the time on the critical activities while helping to keep the project on track. When the project continues over time, the project will consume indirect costs. The end the positive results of the crashing of the project, helped to avoid penalties, and meet the demand of the project completion. The negative effects were that it placed other activities into critical form, as well, and more resources needed to be added in ordered to help the project keep on track and cut down on slack.

Both crashing and fast tracking are methods that can be used by project managers in order to compress the schedules of the project in order to meet the specified deadlines. Both can use the aid of additional resources, and both make changes to the critical path of the project. Unlike crashing, in fast tracking the activities that are normally planned to be performed in a consecutive order are then rescheduled into a more parallel order. It is used when project managers choose to reschedule activities to be work on at the same time instead of doing them one by one at separate times. Fast tracking is the best alternatives when activities will overlap. Fast tracking is also better than crashing because it allows for the project manager to allocate resources in anticipation of working on other tasks at the same time, unlike crashing that adds more resources to the same activity.

When project managers choose to crash the project they change the duration of the task and the critical path of the project. In fast tracking, it only involves changing the duration of the critical path. In both cases there are several risks, fast tracking can have risks when the activities worked on simultaneously might include dependencies’ and the risk of reworking the activities if the final design of the project does not match up with the rest of the project projections. These risks can lead to higher costs and risks of project delay. However, the risks associated with crashing is far greater than fast tracking where project managers can control the risks by working on the other activities if the first project is more than a 50% completed, so that if there  are any problems they can easily go back and fixed the activities without further delays. For project managers, or any managers fast tracking is related to multitasking, allowing for managers and workers to work on different activities within the network at the same time by allocating resources to different activities in order to shave costs and time.