A Short Seminar

The Critical Path Method for scheduling projects was developed over thirty years ago. Yet it remains a little used and less understood tool.

For the experienced project manager, CPM is a tool that saves enormous amounts of time, resources, and money. It shows how seemingly impossible deadlines can be reached, or when they must be postponed. It computes resource usage months in advance, reflects the impact of scope changes, targets workarounds ("crashing the Critical Path"), and provides hard data for prioritizing resource assignments in a multiproject context.

This two hour seminar outlines the fundamentals of CPM. It discusses the benefits and limitations of software algorithms, so that project managers relying on project management packages can work with their systems to optimize their schedules. It explains the alternative methods (PERT, PDM, backward scheduling), their uses and abuses. And it discusses the best ways to eliminate padding from duration estimates. The agenda includes: