Microsoft Project 2013: The Missing Manual

Shortening the Schedule

After you rid your project schedule of errors, omissions, and resource overallocations, your next challenge could be that the project finishes later than the customer and other stakeholders want. In addition, once the project is under way, delays often creep in and push the finish date out further than you had planned. Either way, you have to dive back into the schedule to see if you can shorten it. This section starts with a quick overview of options for shortening a schedule and then describes in detail how to apply each one.

There are several shortening methods to choose from, each with its own set of pros and cons:

• Adjusting resource assignments. If you have people with spare time, some savvy adjustments to who does what might shorten the schedule. You can also adjust resource assignments to use up any slack in the schedule. This approach is one of the first you should try, because it shortens the schedule without affecting scope, quality, or cost.

• Splitting tasks into smaller pieces. Something as simple as breaking long tasks into several shorter ones can sometimes shorten a schedule. You can assign the subtasks to different people, who work on them in tandem, or schedule around other work. This technique also doesn’t affect scope, quality, or cost.

• Overlapping (a.k.a. fast-tracking) tasks. With this approach, you overlap tasks a little instead of working on them in sequence. Fast-tracking works as long as the same resources don’t work on both of the fast-tracked ...