Yesterday I had to attend a family function, some close relative’s marriage. By the way, marriage is a BIG project, in fact a very complicated project with great deal of stakeholders’ expectations management involved!

One of the work packages of this project was getting ready and attending the function. There was a schedule constraint that, we had to reach the venue before certain time. The actual marriage rituals were going to start at a specific time (hard deadline, can’t change) and we must reach before that.

Now, this work package of “getting ready” has following activities, as shown in the picture below. And that’s how the sequence of activities would be (most of the times :-)).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now, you will notice that the activities of you and your kids getting ready, run in parallel to your wife getting ready. So, there are 2 parallel paths. Naturally, one of the paths will be longer than the other, and anyone who is married, can guess, which path will be longer J

Thus, which path dictates schedule of achieving the milestone “all set to leave for function”? Even if some activities like, your bath or your kids getting ready, etc are delayed by 10-15 mins, it hardly matters! But if there is a delay of even a minute on activities on the other path (wrapped in red dashes), the milestone will be late!

That means, your bath or your kid’s bath is “noncritical” to achieving the milestone. However, any activity inside the red dashed box, if delayed by even a minute, will affect the milestone schedule! So, all these activities are “critical” and that path is “critical path”. This is the path which dictates when the milestone will be achieved, and not the other path. That is why, most of the times, you will keep waiting for “the critical path” to complete 🙂 That means, you getting ready or your kids getting ready, these activities have a float 🙂

Interestingly, in this example you will find a “start to finish” dependency type, which is very rare to spot! Start of marriage rituals (activity), drives the finish of you getting ready and it’s not the other way! So this dependency is “start-to-finish”.

Another interesting thing is that there will be several risks on the critical path itself, like – saree may not get draped correctly, the pin-up may not be satisfactory, she may not find matching stuff, make-up may turn out to be not very effective, etc etc… 🙂 And most of the times these risks will occur (becoming issues) and then it results in more and more delays on the critical path, causing a schedule risk to milestone of “reaching venue on time”! And you getting ready, being on the non-critical path, just keep waiting for the milestone “all set to leave for function”!

I think, anyone who is married must have had this experience, several times, for sure! And now, hopefully, you will find the concept of “critical path” simple enough to understand.

 

 

—चिंगुडे