Managing a schedule by critical tasks

Schedule Manager lets you see the schedule's critical path. The critical path is the task or tasks that would likely affect the last task in the schedule if they were completed late.

• The critical path is calculated by determining the last task in the project (time wise).
• Any task where a slip would delay the last task in the project is on the critical path.
• Tasks linked by dependencies have a longer critical path (chain of tasks).
• The tasks on the critical path with the longest sequence of dependent tasks merit the most attention to on-time completion in order to avoid delays.
• Use the critical path to perform better risk assessment and overall project management.

You can view all the tasks on the critical path of a regular schedule, template, or master subschedule in the tree table or the Gantt chart.

Note: The master subschedule displays the critical path from each individual schedule by itself.

You can specify the color of the highlighted tasks on the critical path (the default color is red).

Query for all critical tasks to display detailed information about the critical path in the tree table, for example, the task owner.

Slack time

View the slack time for tasks in the tree table.

Note: Slack time (or float) is the least amount of time a task can be delayed without affecting the dates of the successor task.

• Slack time is displayed in the Time Slack column, but it is not a direct property on the task and cannot be edited.
• The system calculates slack time each time scheduling data related to a critical task changes.
• Values for slack time are displayed only for tasks that have a successor.