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In this video, discover the meaning and importance of critical paths using Microsoft Project 2013.

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Video Transcription:

Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2013. In this section we're going to look at the critical path for a project.

So, first of all, what is the critical path of a project and why is it important? The critical path is the set of tasks that must be completed for the project to be completed on schedule. Even with a project that's not particularly big, there are usually some tasks that could be delayed without affecting the overall end date or duration of a project. But there's also a set of tasks that can't be delayed and that set of tasks is the critical path and it's normally a sequence of tasks that are from the beginning of the project right through to the end of the project. With virtually every project you deal with, it'll be important to know what the critical path is. And the first thing we're going to do in this section is to see how to identify the critical path of a project.

Now what I've done is to add a few more details to our building project. So I've added some subtasks under Lay foundation and some subtasks under Build walls and under Fit roof. So I've still got my five summary tasks but each of them now has a number of subtasks, and if I expand each of those you see that the project is beginning to grow in size.

On the Gantt Chart Tools Format tab, one of the options is a checkbox in the Bar Styles Group for critical tasks. And if you click on this checkbox, you will show the critical tasks of the project in red. So click there are you can see that everything under Prepare site, everything under Lay foundation, everything under Build walls, it's all red which means they are all critical tasks. If I go down to the bottom, everything under Fit roof is critical as well. In fact, the only tasks that aren't critical are the Fit windows and doors task. Now in words the reason for that is that in effect Fit windows and doors happens in parallel according to this schedule with the task of fitting the roof and because the fitting a roof task takes longer, the fitting doors and fitting windows task could take a little longer than we intend without having the overall project delayed. Now, of course, at this stage I'm still looking at a version of this schedule where I have resource overallocation issues. And if I now level the resource, let's see if my critical path changes. So I'm going to go to the Resource tab. I'm going to say Level all. It levels the tasks for the carpenter who was the only overallocated resource and those tasks are still blue. So the red tasks, the ones that were critical are still critical and the blue tasks, the ones that were noncritical are still noncritical.

Now it's very important to know at any time when you're working on a project which the critical path and which the critical tasks are because they're the ones that you must complete on schedule in order for the project to finish on the currently planned finish date, whereas for the noncritical tasks such as ground floor doors here, we've got what is called slack. We can actually have a certain amount of delay on that task without delaying the overall project. And it's slack that we're going to look at next.
Now again if I go to the Gantt Chart Tools Format tab and look in that Bar Styles Group, there is a checkbox there which can show a line to represent slack in a task. Now let's enable slack in this view. For each of the critical tasks, the red ones, there is no slack. But if you look at say this blue ground floor doors task here, you can see a little line coming out of the bottom of it. That line denotes the slack.

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