From the course: Project Management Foundations: Schedules

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Too many or too few critical tasks

Too many or too few critical tasks - Microsoft Project Tutorial

From the course: Project Management Foundations: Schedules

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Too many or too few critical tasks

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- [Instructor] Critical activities by definition have zero slack. However, slack calculations can be thrown off by several factors in your schedule. As you may already know, you should not use date constraints in your schedule unless absolutely necessary because they limit schedule flexibility. Here's another reason, they affect total slack calculations. Say the project manager adds a finish no later than date constraint to the project complete milestone, because that's when the stakeholders say they want the project done. Because of that date constraint, several tasks in the schedule finish later than the project complete milestone, which makes their total slack negative. If your scheduling program sets activities with zero or negative slack as critical, your schedule might have more critical activities than it should, and that makes it difficult to see which activities are truly critical. The solution to this…

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