When I was a business analyst working on a human resource talent acquisition implementation, six weeks out from the launch date the project manager rushed us into a room and asked us to figure out the critical path. I had heard the term critical path before, but I didn’t really understand what it meant. I knew the project was critical to the HR organization and thought everything on the project was on a critical path.

Project managers will be amused that we were trying to figure out the critical path with six weeks before launch rather than prior to project execution. In hindsight, the project manager should’ve known the critical path earlier and been monitoring the schedule’s progress. I still find it puzzling that the project manager asked a bunch of business and system analysts to determine the project’s critical path.
Project Management
It wasn’t until I shifted my career into project management that I gained a better understanding of the critical path and its impact to a project. The Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) defines the critical path as “the sequence of schedule activities that determines the duration of the project.” Project managers can also apply the critical path methodology technique to “determine the amount of float on various logical network paths in the project schedule network to determine the minimum total project duration.”

Critical path explained

If you’re just as confused by the PMBOK speak as I was, let me restate it in a way that’s easier to understand.

The critical path is simply all the tasks that determine the end date in your project schedule. If one of those tasks is late by one day, then your project end date will be extended by one day. Oftentimes, there will be tasks that are not on the critical path; this is due to the slack in the project schedule. If you refer to your current schedule, you can examine the Gantt chart and quickly identify the tasks that have some float compared to the tasks that have no slack.

By Andrew Makar for Tech Republic