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Show the critical path of your project in Project
You can also create separate critical paths within the project: One for each phase of the operation, or for the series of tasks that your team has to finish to complete a vital subproject. To visualize your path after you've entered your task list in Project, click on "View," then "Detail Gantt" or "Gantt Chart," depending how you want to visualize the critical path. If it's important to complete your project by the deadline, you and your team must focus on the critical tasks.
If you have limited resources, allocate enough to those tasks that you reach the end of the critical path by the due date. If the Project display shows you it's unlikely you'll meet the deadline, rework your project concept: Schedule overtime, shorten the deadlines on some of the tasks or revise task dependencies to let your team tackle some tasks simultaneously. A graduate of Oberlin College, Fraser Sherman began writing in Can I see multiple critical paths?
Can I see the critical path across multiple projects? By knowing and tracking the critical path for your project, as well as the resources assigned to critical tasks, you can determine which tasks can affect your project's finish date and whether your project will finish on time.
The top sequence of tasks has no slack also called "float" , and therefore drives the finish date of the project. All tasks in this sequence are on the critical path and are called critical tasks. In the Detail Gantt view, critical tasks appear in red.
The lower sequence of tasks does not drive the finish date of the project, and therefore the tasks are not critical. In the Detail Gantt view, noncritical tasks appear in blue. Total slack or float is the amount of time this sequence of tasks can slip before it affects the finish date of the project. In the Detail Gantt view, total slack appears as a thin teal line. If it's important for your project to finish on schedule, pay close attention to the tasks on the critical path and the resources assigned to them.
If a critical task takes longer than expected or a resource is suddenly unavailable for a critical task, the project will not be completed by the original finish date. A series of tasks is generally interrelated by task dependencies. Although there are likely to be many series of interrelated tasks in your project plan, the series of tasks that will finish the latest is the project's critical path.
Note: The critical path can change as critical tasks are completed or as tasks in another series of tasks are delayed. Show the critical path of your project. View and track scheduling factors. Tasks that cannot be delayed without affecting the project finish date are the critical tasks.
In a typical project, many tasks have some slack and can therefore be delayed a bit without delaying other tasks or affecting the project finish date. As you modify tasks to resolve overallocations, adjust costs, or revise scope, be aware of the critical tasks and that changes to them will affect your project finish date. The project is considered complete when the last task in the critical path is finished. The critical path is continuously calculated by Microsoft Project and can change as tasks are modified or updated.
It is worth noting that this calculation is purely an estimate. Despite this, the critical path gives project managers a good idea of where to focus attention. To see Critical Paths in action, please watch the following video tutorial. The critical path is automatically applied to all projects. It is, however, essential to be able to identify the critical path and the tasks contained within. By knowing and tracking the critical path for your project, as well as the resources that are assigned to each critical task, you can identify the tasks that can affect your project's finish date and thus discover whether your project will finish on schedule.
Learn more by reading Manage your project's critical path. To verify that adjustments that you make to the project plan don't adversely affect the critical path, you can review the critical path and critical tasks in any of several ways.
Note: By default, Project does not display a project's critical path. To display all tasks again, select All Tasks in the Filter list on the toolbar. You can also group all critical tasks together.
On the Project menu, point to Group by , and then select Critical. Follow the instructions in the Gantt Chart Wizard to format the critical path. By default, the Gantt chart bars and link lines for critical tasks are displayed in red. This format change overrides any direct formatting changes previously made to bar styles or to individual bars.
Note that this formatting of critical tasks applies only to the current Gantt Chart view in the current file. To use the same formatting in another file, you can use the Organizer Tools menu to copy formatted Gantt Charts to other files. On the Tools menu, choose Options , select the Calculation tab, and then select the Calculate multiple critical paths check box. Important: This procedure is only effective in a consolidated project. If you don't have a consolidated project, you must first create one.
On the Tools menu, choose Options , select the Calculation tab, and then select the Inserted projects are calculated like summary tasks check box. This is a project-level setting. All projects inserted into this project will be calculated like summary tasks. In Project , a critical task has zero days of slack float. However, you can change this default value and define a task as critical that has, for example, one or two days of slack.
On the Tools menu, choose Options , and then select the Calculation tab. In the Tasks are critical if slack is less than or equal to box, enter the maximum amount of slack, in days, that you want to use to define critical tasks. If you want this value to be the default value for all of your projects, choose Set as Default.
To learn how to find a task's slack, see Show slack in your project. For instructions about changing a task's slack, see Set lead or lag time float between tasks.
Tip: To change the sensitivity of critical tasks, on the Tools menu, choose Options. On the Calculation tab, under Tasks are critical if slack is less than or equal to , specify the number of days under which a task will be considered critical.
In your project, select Timeline.
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