Critical Path During a Project

Dan Kellogg

I can't seem to get my Smartsheet to re-calculate critical path after a critical path item is complete. The critical path should change as items are compeleted. What tells Snartsheet to no longer look at a completed item so it can re-calculate the new critical path during a project?

Travis

Hi Dan, the critical path feature is based on dates and predecessors and will always show the critical path, which is the path that will drive the overall project duration.

 

Critical path will look to dates and predecessors but not other aspects of tasks, such as status or percent complete. 

 

Check out this Help Center article on tracking a project's critical path: http://help.smartsheet.com/customer/en/portal/articles/1979152-tracking-a-project-s-critical-path

Peter Kirkham

@Dan: I also found this guide very useful to understand how critical path is calculated: https://www.smartsheet.com/critical-path-method

 

@Travis: In the blog post announcing the new critical path feature there is some discussion on how can we identify the critical path using a formula. This would be useful if, for example, you wanted to set a flag to indicate that an activity is on the critical path. It shouldn't be too hard as I suspect that Smartsheet is calculating the total slack for each activity and then highlighting all the activities with zero slack. All we would need is a formula like =SLACK() that would reveal the slack for a given activity. Given that all the work is already done to implement critical path method, this should be a trivial enhancement to add.