Project Time Compression: Crashing a Project
Channel: Prof C
Date: 2018-12-19

Thanks for watching my video!! Please check out my newsletter "The Free-Range Technologist" on Substack, where I share all my latest discoveries, tutorials, books, useful apps, and lifehacks. Check it out and sign up here: https://frtech.substack.com/welcome 

I am a technologist and an Associate Teaching Professor of management at the Trulaske College of Business, where my interests focus on technology's impact on society. You can connect with me on my website (https://www.christiansonjs.com/), LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jscottchristianson/), or Twitter (https://twitter.com/JScottMO).

Project Time Compression: Crashing a Project. By adding resources to a project, it may be possible to reduce the amount of time that our project takes. This might be done to deal with negative float (the project is late), but it might also be done to address cost control or to increase profits by capturing incentives. 

Crashing Summary
• Crashing always involves adding resources, so the direct costs of the project will increase when a project is crashed.
• Crashing may lead to overall savings for the project if there are incentives for getting the project done on time (or avoiding penalties). Savings can also be realized by a reduction in the total indirect costs (which accumulate with time).
• In order to crash a project, the project managers evaluated which critical path task(s) can be crashed for the least amount of money. Depending on the complexity of the network, multiple tasks may have to be crashed in order to reduce the project time.
• Crashing can be used to get a project “back on track” or can be used when planning to calculate the optimum schedule for the project.
• Resource availability and staffing will have to be accounted for in a crashed schedule.