Projects come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Throughout the stages, they may face unique challenges. A large and complex project is more likely to encounter problems than a small project involving only a few people.
What are the potential issues that a project might encounter?
A pause
Inadequate quality
An issue with coordination
Misalignment of expectations
A bad strategy
Unforeseen occurrences
Factors outside the organization
Modification of the scope
While each of these issues could be discussed in-depth, we are more interested in what you should do if any of these problems arise in your project. What are the consequences of a project deviating from its original course? The project’s completion date is pushed back, the project’s costs rise, or the project is scrapped. Each of these scenarios has ramifications.
The decision that you must make will vary depending on the type of project. If the project is canceled, the only thing left to do is learn from it and figure out how to avoid something similar from happening again.
If there is a delay or another problem, you should try to get the project back on track. You could do this by calculating the cost of the problem. Some projects may impose penalties if the completion date is not met.
Even if a project is on track, you may need to move the completion date forward due to an external factor. A competitor, for example, is working on a similar project.
In both cases, you will need to find a way to increase the project’s speed and reduce the time required to complete the project. This is what Project Crashing intends to accomplish.
What Exactly Is Project Crashing?
Project crashing is the process of reducing the time that a project is expected to take. This is accomplished primarily by adding more resources to it. Depending on what is causing the delay or taking a long time, you may find a variety of ways to add resources to a project. This must be done within budgetary and quality constraints, and it must be approved and supported by key stakeholders.
Crashing is defined as
Crashing in a project is an activity that shortens the completion time of a project while increasing the cost as little as possible.
Individuals from the different teams could be assigned to a time-sensitive activity.
Crashing can also be done for individual project activities. If shortening the duration of that activity reduces the time required for project completion, the cost incurred becomes more easily justified.
Crashing does not always necessitate the addition of resources. It may also entail reducing the scope of a project in some cases. For example, a four-lane highway plan may be scaled back to build a two-lane highway instead to reduce completion time and meet immediate needs.
What Causes Project Management Crashing?
The reason for needing to crash a project does not have to be something wrong with the project itself. It is sometimes an external factor that alters the estimated delivery time or necessitates a faster completion.
If there is a severe penalty for missing a project completion deadline, the increased cost of crashing may be justified to some extent. A bonus for completing a project faster can also be a reason to cancel it.
If an external change occurs, such as a competitor working on a similar project, the cost of not speeding up the project would result in the loss of competitive advantage.
If there is an activity that causes a slew of other activities to be delayed, halting that activity could benefit the entire project.
Alternatively, if there are new people or an idle workforce available that was not previously anticipated, the project plan can be changed to use this additional workforce to reduce completion time.
Crashing is sometimes required because of another project. If a new project requires the individuals working on the current project to be available, the current project may need to be crashed.
There is no way to provide an exhaustive list of reasons for the need to halt a project. There could be a variety of project environmental aspects or an external factor that necessitates a faster completion of the project.
An Example of a Project Management Crash
Projects are taking place all around us. Projects frequently encounter problems and may need to be reprioritized or accelerated for a variety of reasons. One of the most prominent examples we saw was in the development of vaccines. Several companies and countries were working on projects to develop a vaccine as the COVID pandemic spread around the world. By doing things differently, a process that would normally take years was reduced to less than a year.
As the need for a vaccine became critical, the funding required was not an issue. To expedite the project, procedures were shortened or accelerated. Fast-tracking entails performing multiple tasks at the same time and is not associated with project failure.
Caption: The image depicts how fast-tracking aided in the development of the vaccine by allowing multiple tasks to be completed at the same time. In a normal situation, each phase would begin only after the previous phase was completed.
Despite the fact that many bureaucratic processes and documentation were sped up, there were some aspects of the project that could not be sped up. Regardless of how much money is invested in the project, the time required for testing and waiting to see if the vaccine is effective in volunteers cannot be shortened. This is the point at which the car will crash.
Within a year, many projects around the world had successfully developed a viable vaccine, with more in the works. This demonstrates how project crashing can be used effectively without sacrificing quality.
Best Practices for Project Crashing
Crashing a project is typically reserved as a last resort. If the cost of crashing was not significant, the timing of the activity in question would be optimized in the original project plan. There are several factors to consider when crashing into an activity in your project.
The Critical Path
A critical path is a series of activities that span the duration of a project. Reducing the duration of an activity in this critical path will reduce the overall project completion time. Similarly, a delay in such activity will cause the entire project to be delayed.
The red line denotes the critical path, and the activities on the critical path are the ones that should be prioritized if a project fails. Crashing an activity that is not on the critical path has no effect on the total time required to finish the project.
Cost and Advantage
Most activities can be disrupted to some extent. A comparison of the cost of crashing the activity and the benefit it provides can be used to determine which activities should be canceled.
Availability of Resources
If an activity does not necessitate a difficult-to-find skill set, it will be easy to find more people to work on it, making it more likely to fail. Organizations may even have skilled professionals on hand who can be used for a specific activity for a limited time. The ready availability of such a workforce should also be considered when considering project cancellation.
Training requirements
If an activity necessitates a specialized skill set, it will be difficult to crash it. Outsourcing a portion of the activity or spending time training new personnel can be time-consuming and costly.
There will be numerous factors affecting your project that you will be better able to evaluate. While crashing a project, many of these factors may need to be considered. Once you’ve created a plan and a budget, it’s critical to get it approved by the project sponsors and key stakeholders.
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