Project Management Fast-Tracking: How To Fast Track A Schedule

Project Management Fast-Tracking: How To Fast Track A Schedule

Fast-tracking in project management is a way to manage time, schedule and activities in a way that allows for quicker project execution. It involves executing activities at the same time rather than sequentially, and requires all the activities to overlap with one another. However, rearranging activities in your project to fast-track them can increase risk and result in losing time and having to push deadlines further out. Schedule compression is a technique to shorten the length of the project but keep the project scope unchanged. Project crashing is a technique used by project managers to adjust the project schedule when falling behind or when needing to complete a project sooner than expected.

It involves more resources being added to the project while attempting to not greatly increase costs. The analysis of cost and schedule tradeoffs is based on the lowest crash cost per unit of time. The results of such analysis are shared as a crash graph, which shows activities that save the most time with the least increase in cost. Fast-tracking is executing project activities at the same time, while project crashing is adding resources. Both have their pros and cons.