What is Crashing Network in Examination?

CRASHING NETWORK IN EXAMINATION :

a)      Only critical activities affect the project duration so take care not to crash non-critical activities.

b)      The minimum possible project duration is not necessarily the most profitable option. It may be cost effective to pay some penalties to avoid higher crash costs.

c)      If there are several independent critical paths then several activities will need to be crashed simultaneously. If there are several critical paths which are not separate i.e. they share an activity or activities then it may be cost effective to crash the shared activities even though they may not have lowest cost slopes.

Summary for Crashing :

(a)     Cost analysis of network seeks the cheapest ways of reducing project times.

(b)     The crash cost is the cost associated with the minimum possible time for an activities, which is known as the crash time.

(c)     The average cost of shortening an activity by one time period (day, week etc.) is known as the cost slope.

(d)     Least cost scheduling finds the cheapest of reducing the overall project time by reducing the time of the activity on the critical path with the lowest cost slope.

(e)     The total project cost includes ALL activity costs not just those on the critical path.

(f)      The usual assumption is that the cost slope is linear. This need not be so and care should be taken not to make the linearity assumption when circumstances point to some other conclusion.

(g)     Dummy activities have zero slopes and cannot be crashed.

The resources (men of varying skills, machines of all types, the required materials, finance, and space) used in a project are subject to varying demands and loadings as the project proceeds. Management need to know what activities and what resources are critical to the project duration and if resource limitations (e.g. shortage of materials, limited number of skilled craftsmen) might delay the project. The also wish to ensure, as far as possible constant work rates to eliminate paying overtime at one stage of a project and having short time working at another stage.