Why crash a project

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It only takes a minute to sign up. Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. Crashing is simply the concept of throwing more resources--be it money, tools and machinery, humans, etc--at a work package in an attempt to decrease its overall duration. The general idea is, if you planned 10 days with one person to do a task, then applying a second person will decrease the duration to five days.

The issue is, this does not work that cleanly in real life. There are a ton of environmental and random variables at play that affect performance, as well as the resource elasticity of the task, where crashing may have no effect at all or actually make things worse.

For example, moving boxes from point A to B would have a ton of resource elasticity. Throwing more box movers at the task should certainly decrease the overall duration.

However, the site and situation of both point A and point B may decrease the efficacy of crashing as you may clog the path between point A and B with more box movers and then slow things up. A task with zero resource elasticity is like driving from Point A to B. Throwing another driving in the car will do nothing to get to B faster. EDIT: Gestation is a common example of how crashing does not work, but it is also not an accurate example.

While we always consider pregnancy as nine months, gestation is probabilistic ranging from as few as 22 or 23 weeks to 46 weeks. So one could crash a pregnancy duration by introducing a prostaglandin to induce labor. A resource is not just human but is any and all resources, including this medicine. Therefore, a pregnancy does have some resource elasticity albeit with a high degree of costs and risks.

Crashing refers to adding more resources to critical activities in order to reduce the duration and save time while fast tracking is an attempt to make activities that would have occurred in sequence one after the other to occur in parallel happen at the same time with little or no delay between them.

Although these strategies can be applied to projects, there are several things that should be considered. One key factor is that not all activities can be shortened using these measures and other strategies or a combination of strategies should be put in place to address such situations. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top.

Project crashing is an advanced project management technique that involves adding the appropriate amount of qualified resources to the activities being taken into account. It will inevitably have a direct impact on two of the three constraints, ie. Crashing accelerates delivery and increases spending; however, it will have no effect on the scope of the project.

If it is not possible to add resources to critical activities, it is not recommended to implement the project crashing. There are several methods of crashing a project. Clearly, the modality to be chosen will be the one that allows to speed up the end of the project at the lowest possible cost. This is the most commonly used method and involves increasing the number of resources dedicated to certain critical activities.

This essentially means reducing the time needed to carry out individual activities by increasing the number of people working on them. For example, if Luca takes 4 hours to complete an activity, by logic Luca and Martina will take 2 hours each to complete that same activity. However, adding resources is not always the best solution. In fact, it is sometimes the cause of long-term loss of time. We need therefore to consider the following:. For these reasons, if the insertion of new resources proves to be too problematic, there is a second technique that allows the crashing of a project.

This methodology consists of overlapping activities that were initially programmed in sequence. These activities will therefore take place in parallel, rather than one after the other. Of course, the application of this technique requires a prior analysis of the feasibility and potential risks. For example, in addition to adding new resources, you can reprogram the project in order to work on multiple items at once rather than sequentially.