EPM Implementations: Will the Critical Path Method Hold You Back?

Many Enterprise Project Management implementations live or die based on their ability to implement Critical Path Method techniques (CPM) across the organization. Other’s have a critical need to optimize scarce, expensive and shared resources. Organizations make a significant investment in an implementation, but may fail against their original objectives because of the difficulty of implementing CPM.

The CPM technique has its roots in the 1950's and has been used successfully to determine the sequencing of tasks needed to complete a project, it’s earliest finish date, and to manage a project by aligning with it’s time objectives.

The Critical Path Method was developed on large capital projects where the investment in developing the skills to build and maintain CPM schedules was available. The nature of these projects was such that the work was suitable for the CPM approach: well-defined tasks with dedicated resources and evident completion criteria. 

The Critical Path Method technique requires considerable effort to be spent up front defining and fine tuning the project schedule. The schedule needs to be updated on a regular basis to reflect status and changes in approach. The technique is particularly suited to modeling work where tasks and the relationships between them are well defined and not “fuzzy”. 

Since the 1980's, organizations with projects that are markedly different from the large capital projects have attempted to adopt Critical Path Method with mixed success. Industries such as pharmaceuticals and software development are project-oriented but the nature of their projects is quite different: 

• The tasks involved in a project are often a lot “softer”
• The relationship between the tasks is “softer”
• Individual productivity plays a much larger role
• There is often resource contention across projects
• There are many small projects

Often, the primary need of these organizations is weighted more toward getting visibility of their resources across the projects and being able to play ‘what if’s’ from a resourcing perspective. Conceptually, implementing a resource-loaded Critical Path Method schedule for each project (and keeping them all up to date) can help this, but in practice it is very difficult because the scheduling skills/discipline needed to maintain schedules across the organization are not present.

There may be some improvement on individual projects as a result of implementing CPM but the overall organizational visibility is often not achieved. 

The first step to avoiding this failure is to be clear on your requirements. Are your needs primarily about getting visibility of resources or is it about improved schedule performance for individual projects? 

Your choice of tools will vary depending on your goals.  Many tools are based on a bottoms up method of resource allocation requiring a great level of detail to assign resources.  Some allow for resources to be planned at intermediate levels of activities or WBS elements.  Another class of tools focuses primarily on resources being allocated across the portfolio to projects and requires very little, if any, project level planning.

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