When we say that an activity will take a certain number of days or weeks, what we really mean is this activity normally takes this many days or weeks. We could make it take less time, but to do so would cost more money. Spending more money to get something done more quickly is called “crashing.”
There are various methods of project schedule crashing, and the decision to crash should only take place after you’ve carefully analyzed all of the possible alternatives. The key is to attain maximum decrease in schedule time with minimum cost.
Increasing Your Resources
There are a number of standard and typical approaches to attempting to crash a project schedule. One of the most commonly utilized methods involves increasing the assignment of resources on schedule activities. This essentially means decreasing the time it takes to perform individual activities by increasing the number of people working on those activities.
Pros:
This makes sense, at first glance. For example, if it takes Bob 4 hours to complete an activity, it would logically take Bob and Sue 2 hours to complete the same activity.
Cons:
Adding resources isn’t always the best solution, though. Sometimes it ends up taking more time in the long run. Consider the following:
- New resources aren't going to be familiar with the tasks at hand, so they will probably be less productive than current team members.
- Who will guide the new members up the learning curve? Usually it will be the most productive members of the team, who could themselves be working to get the task finished more quickly.
- Being available does not equal being qualified. Not even the best neurosurgeon in the world will help if you need an HTML programmer. Sometimes extra hands are only tangentially qualified for the work, and even if the new resources have the right skills, they may not be on the same caliber as the current team members (too many cooks spoil the soup!).
With that in mind, maybe you've decided that adding resources isn’t the best method for crashing your project. Don't worry, you have other options.