When working on a certain project, it is very important to analyze how various tasks would affect your project timeline. Project for the web provides such a method to calculate critical path of a project. Project for the web helps you to calculate the estimated finish date of your project and the delay or timely completion of your project.
What is critical path?
Critical path of a project is the complete series of all the tasks in your project that needs to be completed on time to complete your project on its due date.
Example:
In this case, assuming that there is no dependency within your tasks, then the critical path of your project is Task 3 because it ends the latest and thus defines the finish date of your project.
What is critical path?
Without the ability to calculate obstacles within the time period of a project or analyzing different portions of a project which defines the completion, many projects would never even leave the ground.
Critical path is basically a ‘red alert’ for your project. If your project does not follow the timing of the critical path, it will never be able to finish within the timeline.
How to calculate critical path?
- Divide your project into tasks.
- Identify all the dependencies.
- Estimate the duration of your tasks.
- Determine the critical path based on the task finish date.
Now moving away from theory, let’s see how we can work on this with Project for the web.
Project for the web has three tabs in the top menu bar:
- Grid: Grid gives you a project online type of view of your project by listing tasks, resources, and other information in a tabular form.
- Board: Board gives a more concise bucket view of your project wherein when you click on each task, a detailed view is opened.
- Timeline: Timeline provides a Gantt chart view of your project with all the tasks displayed in a more graphical manner.
1. Select timeline
2. The view after enabling critical path will be something like this.
The critical path feature is user specific. If two users A and B have permission on one project and user A enables critical path, the same will not be reflected for user B.
Also, every time the user reloads the project, the ‘show critical path’ toggle will turn off.
Thus, because of the incredible usability and effectiveness, critical path is a project necessity in organizations everywhere. In modern times, organizations tend to work on a hybrid system, and Project for the web effectively combines Agile methodology with timeline and critical path. Users with Plan 3 and Plan 5 licenses can make use of this functionality.
Compare project management solutions and costs | Microsoft ProjectHope this article has helped you learn how to find critical path in a much more straightforward way. Happy planning!
