“The Critical Path is Not Critical”

The complexity of today’s projects often requires robust project management software and technology in order to effectively track all the moving parts of your business. With so many differing stakeholders there is often a disconnect between who is beholden to the critical path and how it works.

The shortest description is that the critical path is all about timing, it’s about finding the most bottle-necked areas of your project and exploiting them for the most efficient project completion. It’s almost always about the timing of your project.

There will be detractors who, without understanding this principle, may well attempt to derail a project, many times unknowingly. They may feel the critical path is not the “technical” path, the most difficult path or the path that is critical to their particular function as a stakeholder in the project. While each of these could be an individual’s concern going into the project, there must be wholehearted understanding that the critical path is all about the timing. Ignoring it is simply another way of expanding your expenses via costly time-consuming projects where project managers go rouge at the expense of the organization. Believe me, this is not a good place to be.