Fast Tracking vs Crashing: Best Schedule Compression Techniques

In project management, schedules can often become the focal point of a project's success or failure. Sometimes, despite our best efforts, our plans don’t align with the project's timeline. This is when schedule compression techniques become essential to keep things on track.

When might schedule compression be necessary?

A perfect example is when risks materialize and disrupt the project timeline. Whether it’s delays in deliverables, scope changes, or unexpected technical challenges, it’s important to have strategies ready for compressing the schedule to meet project deadlines.

What are the key schedule compression techniques?

Let’s explore a few common approaches:

1. Reassessment of Estimates. The first and often most cost-effective method is to reassess your project estimates. Maybe your initial estimates were too conservative or incorrect. A reevaluation might show that tasks could be completed in less time than originally planned. This technique involves zero cost, unlike other methods that may require financial resources.
2. Crashing. Crashing is about adding more resources to speed up the project timeline. This could involve increasing team size or bringing in specialists with a higher level of expertise. It’s important to remember that adding more people to a task doesn’t always lead to proportional time savings and can sometimes create inefficiencies. 
3. Fast Tracking. Fast tracking is the practice of identifying tasks that can be completed in parallel, even if they were originally planned to occur sequentially. This technique reduces the total project timeline but comes with a significant increase in risk. 
4. Reducing Scope. Another way to compress the schedule is to reduce the project scope by eliminating non-essential tasks or deliverables. While this approach might cut down the timeline, it’s critical to ensure that the reduction won’t compromise the project’s success or deliverable quality.
5. Reducing Quality. In some cases, reducing the quality of deliverables can save time. For example, skipping certain testing procedures or reducing documentation requirements can speed up the project, but it also increases the likelihood of errors and post-release issues.
6. Denying Change Requests. If the need for schedule compression is due to scope changes introduced midway through the project, one option is to simply reject these changes. By maintaining the original scope, you can avoid any additional delays.
7. Overtime. While increasing working hours may seem like an easy solution, it’s far from ideal. Overtime can lead to fatigue, decreased productivity, and team burnout. It’s a costly approach in terms of both morale and finances, and often leads to diminishing returns.

Deep dive into fast tracking in project management

Fast tracking is often considered the most aggressive schedule compression technique. It involves reworking the sequence of tasks to overlap activities that were previously scheduled to occur in succession. For instance, if design and development were meant to be done one after another, fast tracking might involve starting development before the design is fully complete.

While fast tracking can significantly cut down on time, it inherently comes with greater risk. The overlapping tasks might lead to rework if one affects the other, which can introduce delays and quality issues. Therefore, it’s essential to carefully assess which tasks can truly be done in parallel without creating additional bottlenecks down the line.

Deep dive into crashing in project management

Project crashing, on the other hand, focuses on adding extra resources or reallocating the most skilled team members to speed up task completion. You might hire external specialists or dedicate more experienced internal team members to critical tasks. However, crashing often comes with higher costs—more people mean more salaries, and highly skilled professionals tend to charge more for their expertise.

It’s also important to consider diminishing returns with crashing. Adding people to a project does not guarantee faster completion if there’s a limit to how much work can be done simultaneously. Plus, the bigger your team, the more communication issues may show up. In fact, having too many hands on a task can sometimes slow things down due to coordination issues or overcrowded workflows.

Conclusion

Schedule compression techniques can be highly effective for getting your project back on track, but each method comes with its own set of trade-offs. Whether you choose fast tracking, crashing, or another approach, it's important to weigh the risks, costs, and potential impacts on project quality before moving forward. Always aim for the least disruptive method first, such as reassessing estimates, before turning to more aggressive measures like fast tracking or crashing.

About the Author

Sergey Koshevoy is the CEO of Planyway and a seasoned product manager, bringing a wealth of experience in project management and team collaboration tools. A fan of productivity techniques, Sergey is passionate about creating intuitive and efficient solutions that help teams work smarter and achieve their goals.