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chapter ve
Optimizing the schedule
with drag and drag cost
“Where can you go to buy time, and how much should
you pay?”
In a recent online conversation about critical path drag with an experienced
and competent project manager, I suddenly discovered that despite his
knowing about the concept, he really didn’t appreciate how to use it. Ithere-
fore explain in this chapter how to use drag both to optimize a schedule
during upfront planning and to recover a schedule that has slipped.
Unfortunately, optimizing the schedule during the planning phase
is something that is rarely done, largely because project managers don’t
know how to do it. They often ...