Critical Path – Project Manager – Australia's online resource for project management professionals

Predicting project completion

Working out the probable completion date for a project and understanding the risks associated with achieving a target date have always been difficult. Pat Weaver outlines the challenges of finding effective, realistic and reliable schedules.

May 13, 2014

A Tale of Two CPMs

It was is the best of times, it was is the worst of times: project management knowledge, understanding and use is expanding worldwide but project failure rates are increasing or at best static. Lynda Bourne on how the Critical Path Method is at odds with complex project management.

September 17, 2013

Advanced

Distributed versus consolidated project contingencies

Distributed contingencies are normal in most aspects of project management but often result in sub-optimal use of resources. Pat Weaver looks at how consolidated contingency may be a better option.

July 11, 2012

Cost
Risk

The myth of project float

The concept of including ‘float’ in a project is less than 60 years old. The key question is, if schedule float did not exist before 1957, how real is it today? Pat Weaver explains why float is a “useful fiction” for lawyers and planners.

June 13, 2012

Time

Resource optimisation for successful project outcomes

Current critical path method (CPM) scheduling fails to deliver successful project outcomes, in part because the automatic resource levelling systems in most tools, most of the time, produce sub-optimal results and changing a few settings in any of the tools can produce wildly different outcomes.

December 14, 2011

Time

A brief history of project scheduling

Project scheduling has come a long way since the pyramids. Find out how Gantt developed his chart and how scheduling evolved along with computers.

November 16, 2011

Time

Logically built project schedules

The great divide between people who plan logically and those that just plug in dates just got a whole lot wider with the release of MS Project 2010. The cause—Manually Scheduled task mode.

July 7, 2011

Project management through the 1950s

Projects have been undertaken since antiquity, however there is substantial agreement that modern project management as a distinctive discipline had its origins in the 1950s. There were, however, some relatively recent antecedents to these origins, which Peter Morris discusses in The Management of Projects, which I regard as the definitive history of project management up […]

February 10, 2011