critical path

Sunil,

3 major problems with artificially creating a critical path:

1) You don't know what your true critical path is, hence you cannot focus attention on the most important activities to deliver on time. This is the entire point of having a critical path.

2) In order to artificailly create a critical path, you need to deliberately put false activities/logic/durations/constraints into your programme. This is clearly bad practise for obvious reasons.

3) (and this is the big one). You would be telling lies. Depending on who you are telling the lies to and why, you may even be committing fraud.

It happens quite often when contractors inflate durations in contract/tender programmes to give themselves more float, or even to make client deliverables appear more critical than they actually are, and hence improve their chances of getting a sucessful EOT. I dislike the practise intensely. It is dishonest and unprofessional.

I have also heard of contractors doing it to subcontractors, so they can deny EOTs / impose LDs on them. I find this particularly loathesome.

Gary,

Thanks for this useful information.

Regards,

Sunil

Hi Sunil

An easy test to see if the critical path has been rigged is if there are more than one of them in the programme.

Hi Gary

I am with you completely on fraudulent programmes - maybe we should prosecute one or two when we next encounter them.

Best regards

Mike Testro