CRITICAL PATHCritical path is important for a number of reasons.
Nearly 70 percent of the effort on this project is taken up with two tasks: write document and revise document. If we were to add a person or even two people to these tasks our natural reaction would be to expect a substantial improvement on the schedule. In practice, nothing could be further from the truth. Adding one person (i.e. increasing the team by 50 percent) reduces the schedule to
while adding another person and increasing the team by 100 percent reduces the schedule to
And note that adding more people assumes that they can just slot in with no prior knowledge of the particular task, and be as productive as the people who were already there. Such an assumption is rarely the case in IT. Indeed, there is an argument that says that in certain circumstances adding people to a project will not actually shorten the schedule at all. This argument is succinctly stated in Brook's Law (Brooks, 1975). Adding people to a late project makes it later. |