Redneck said:
D.
The short answer to your question is no, and end up with something
meaningful to automatically reschedule a project to 58% of the original time.
What you should do is revisit you schedule and consider the durations along
your critical path (and near-critical path). Ask yourself, "can any of these
tasks overlap"? If so, give them a SS or FF predessor relationship that is
appropriate.
Or use lead time to overlap tasks.
You can reduce overall time that way. Also are your durations too "fat"?
Are you using responsibly conservative durations? Do you need to be more
"flaming liberal" in your view of how long tasks can take. Can durations be
reduced because another army of resources can be applied to the job?
Scheduling takes alot of elbow grease. There ain't no automatic and get it
right. Cutting down to 58% of the time may add a little risk to the project.
Least that's my opinion.
David
Good luck
Something to consider it that it may not be possible to shorten the
project by that much. All too often, management thinks that a project
can be done in whatever time they wish. But an old saying in Project
Management is that, "No matter how many people you put to work on it, a
pregnancy still takes 9 months". Some tasks/projects can be accelerated
by adding resources, others can't. And adding resources once a task has
begun almost invariably increases duration rather than decreasing it.
There are other ways to accelerate a schedule to numerous to go into
here, but you might look into that.
Further, accelerating a schedule that much will most definitely
increase cost and schedule risk. It will also increase cost
considerably, without question. It takes a lot of experience and
judgement to accelerate a project this much.
There are a lot of reasons this can't be done automatically. If you
decide to reduce all durations proportionately to accelerate the
project, you will almost assuredly have a "fake" schedule. There are
usually tasks that cannot be accelerated this way, like the example of
the pregnancy. Getting permits comes to mind as a common real world
example. There are many others. Beyond that, any task has a limit to
how many resources can effectively be added. If it takes one programmer
10 days to write 5000 lines of code, can 5000 programmers write the
code in 2.88 minutes? The tasks have to be looked at one by one to
determine how much, if any, their durations can be reduced.
And then you should consider Quality. In most cases, accelerating a
project that significantly is almost impossible to do without
sacrificing quality. If this is acceptable, then go ahead. Usually, in
these kinds of cases, the loss of quality is ignored. Everyone pretends
it isn't happening. Unfortunately, someone down the road is unhappy. Is
your client the type to overlook this? If not, let your lawyers start
preparing to defend your decisions in court.
The poster above said risk might increase. I can tell you from
experience it will. You should factor all these considerations in
before making, or agreeing to, this kind of radical schedule change.
Who will be blamed if some or all of these things I've mentioned come
to pass? Usually, the PM. I strongly recommend you do some CYA here, if
nothing else.
Hope this helps in your world.
