Illustrative Critical Path Examples to Master Your Project Efficiency
Project managers often look for a convenient way to visualize a critical path and apply it to their projects effectively.
In this post, you’ll discover how to define and visualize critical path examples using a reliable PM tool with specialized algorithms.
You’ll find two examples with different critical paths:
- The example of a critical path in project management.
- The example of a critical path in construction.
Let’s dive into the details.
A critical path visualization can be easily achieved with the help of a reliable management tool. One of the best examples here is a Gantt chart. It is not just a robust assistant in planning project schedules but also a constituent element of the successful project outcome in general.
Let’s now explore the real examples of applying a critical path in a project.
Critical path in project management example
The critical path method in project management provides early warnings about possible project delays and assists in resource and budget planning. Staying on the path is vital to ensure on-time and budget-compliant project completion.
One of the top solutions for visualizing critical paths is GanttPRO Gantt chart builder.
This reliable critical path software gives managers a visually appealing way to determine what tasks directly affect the project completion date.
It’s pretty easy to find a critical path in this software. You just need to switch on a related feature in GanttPRO project settings.
In the following example, we’ll explore the project of developing a website for an online store.
To succeed, you’ll need to go through the next steps.
1. Gathering project goals and collecting ideas
When planning your project, start by defining its goals and objectives. Outline your online store’s desired outcomes. Identify target audience and key performance indicators (KPIs). Organize your ideas systematically.
Additionally, conduct market research and select a domain and hosting for your future e-commerce website.
2. Project creation, a timeline, and tasks
Take a couple of seconds to start your project in GanttPRO.
Next, transform your list of ideas into actionable tasks and input them into a timeline. Be sure to include start and end dates, along with task durations.
The development of your online store website may involve intricate and long-term tasks. GanttPRO recommends using a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) to break these tasks into smaller segments.
Furthermore, it’s valuable to estimate the time needed to complete all project tasks and activities, using units such as days, weeks, months, or even years.
Our project begins with the idea collection and planning. During this period, project teams work with many subtasks, including scope of work, goals and objectives, general requirements, etc.
They design the homepage of the store website as well as work on the homepage layout design, categories and subcategories, featured products section, drop-down menu, and scrolling system.
They design and test important buttons and perform many more activities related to development processes, testing, and the final launch of the website. All of these tasks include many additional subtasks and events.
We won’t describe all the details of each task and will move to the next stage.
3. Adding dependencies and milestones
Identifying task dependencies is crucial. You can utilize the drag & drop feature for this purpose.
Also remember to designate project milestones on your timeline.
4. Enabling a critical path
Now that we have identified the activities and dependencies in our project management example, we can locate the critical path.
In GanttPRO, activating the critical path takes just a few seconds. Simply click the icon located in the top left corner of the project settings.
You’ll immediately see how the software determines the path. The chain of important tasks will be shown in red.
Note that you’ll have a higher probability of schedule changes if you have several critical paths.
That was quite a common critical path project management example related to planning and developing an online store website. And you might want to look at some other example of the critical path being used in a different area.
We are pleased to invite you to dive into another critical path example in construction, but for this, you need to go to the full version of this article — https://blog.ganttpro.com/en/critical-path-examples/.
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