CPM Scheduling and Critical Path Example

In this comprehensive lesson, Michael will show you the inner workings of the Critical Path Method as he walks you through scheduling an example project step by step. Learn how the Critical Path Method's forward and backwards pass calculations work and how CPM reveals your project's Critical Path. Knowing CPM Scheduling will no doubt make you a better scheduler.

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This is a very simple example of a simple project schedule. I have I think it's 8 activities here, A through H. Their durations are set in blue and we have to keep things simple. I only used finish to start relationships so I have no fancy relationships in here, just finish to start to keep things very simple. Now CPM scheduling happens in two passes. Essentially, we're going to walk through the project schedule in a forward pass and what that means is we'll start at activity A and will move through the schedule to activity H, and in that forward pass, we're going to write some numbers at the bottom of each box.

We’ll write in dates recalled ES and EF. Anybody know what those stand for? Think about it Ok. They stand for Early Start and Early Finish. My forward pass will calculate those early dates. They were the earliest the activity can possibly start and the earliest they can possibly finish.

So after I do that for all activities, I’m then going to walk through and do that with the backwards pass. So essentially I’ll start at the end of the project and come back in a reverse direction. And in the backwards pass, we’ll be calculating these dates. LS and LF and those are, you guessed it. Late Start and Late Finish dates. So two passes. Now after I do those two passes, I will have essentially set the dates for my schedule but then I want to do a li...

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