What Is Critical Path in Project Management?
What Is Critical Path in Project Management?
Critical path is a method for modeling projects where you input all necessary factors involved in your project and output the optimal timeline for completing it. Factors to input in your model include time estimates, task dependencies, milestones or deliverables, and any hard deadlines set by clients or stakeholders.
The foundation of both critical path analysis and critical path method is that you cannot start a task until you finish the previous one. When you string these dependent tasks together from start to finish, you get your critical path. Reviewing this critical path of events allows project managers to prioritize and allocate resources to get the most important tasks done and reschedule any lower priority jobs clogging up the team's bandwidth. This way, changes can be made to optimize work without delaying the results. A related concept is PERT.
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What is Critical Path in Project Management?
Artem Gurnov
Artem is a Director of Account Development at Wrike. He previously held the role of Project Manager, overseeing a team of customer success managers (CSMs). Over the years of building teams and scaling business processes, he has successfully deployed multiple projects, from automating client outreach to setting up work prioritization tools for sales reps and CSMs.