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CHAPTER 3.1

CRITICAL PATH SCHEDULING

Now here’s a boring subject: Critical Path Scheduling! Many of you will be
well-versed in the subject and can move on to more interesting topics. You
can also find detailed discussion on critical path scheduling in many of the basic
books on project management and in books and electronic notes distributed with
all project management software products. For the PM 101 crowd, we include a
brief discussion of critical path scheduling in this chapter.

The Critical Path Method (CPM) is the basis of almost any project schedule.
Even if you do not use a computer for scheduling, you probably use CPM con-
cepts—possibly without even realizing it. My advice is to obtain a good project
management software system and to use the critical path scheduling capabili-
ties effectively to develop and manage your project schedules. Therefore, our
discussion on project scheduling will assume that you are utilizing computers
for planning and control, and that you have critical path scheduling capabilities
on these computers.

What is critical path scheduling? Basically, it is the process of determining
when work can be done, by identifying the precedence relationships between the
tasks. It seems simple enough. Yet, many people botch up this simple process and
several totally ignore the critical path scheduling capabilities, even when using
critical path scheduling tools. What a shame!

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