Critical Path Process Analysis

Introduction

The success of every project depends on proper planning, efficient management of resources including costs and management of quality of execution. The key step that guarantees the successful outcome of the project is the planning step because that is where all the critical project life milestones are defined and scheduled.

Time management is the most critical aspect in the whole project life cycle and if not managed correctly it may result in undesirable results such as escalating costs, loss of valuable resources and compromised quality. The project team has to prioritise so that those critical aspects that need to be accomplished, get accomplished on time. The project life cycle helps to guide the timing of decisions in that

The essential technique for using CPM is to construct a model of the project that include a list of all activities required to complete the project (typically categorized within a WBS), the duration that each activity will take to complete, the dependencies between the activities and, a logical end points such as milestones or deliverable items.

Using these values, CPM calculates the longest path of planned activities to logical end points or to the end of the project, and the earliest and latest that each activity can start and finish without making the project longer. This process determines which activities are "critical" (i.e., on the longest path) and which have "total float" (for example, can be delayed without making the project longer). In project management, a critical path is the sequence of project network activities which add up to the longest overall duration, regardless if that longest duration has float or not. This determines the shortest time possible to complete the

Thus, maintaining accurate and reliable time and attendance information makes labour management a whole lot more manageable. Automated timekeeping will also help keep track of project tasks and milestone in order to manage delays and identify possible risks before they can even happen. The great interest to project managers for having an automated timekeeping is to know how much time the individual project team had spent on the projects and what was worked on. Therefore the system must allow certain data to be restricted to certain employees, for an example:

A project manager controls the time spent on the project and what was worked on the project while finance department have to look at the employee pay data, how many hours worked per week etc. While a project manager might look at the project costs for anyone, it is often inappropriate to allow a project manager to view the actual pay rates for every employee. Therefore, the system must work across the database and structural requirements of the institution as a whole and different people should be given different access of what is relevant to