Impact of Project Crashing Peer Review 1
Provide a classmate review on their discussion topic :
Review the module reading and presentation, and view the video below about project crashing. Provide your opinion of why crashing a project may be necessary and what may be the positive and negative impacts resulting from crashing.
Project crashing explained (YouTube 5:58)
Classmate post that you need to post comment/ review on:
Crashing a project may be necessary if the project schedule has already been delayed due to other issues, or if the customer changes their timeline and wants the project finished earlier. Typically project crashing is expensive and requires increasing the budget to apply additional resources to speed up work. Occasionally however, if the team is renting equipment, or the company paying for the project has suspended operation/services during the project, then the cost saved by completing a day early may be more than the cost of accelerating the work. Consider an airline that makes $10,000 per flight and completes 2 flights a day with each aircraft. If an aircraft is taken out of service for maintenance, accelerating repairs by one day would save the company $20,000 because the aircraft begins generating revenue again. If crashing cost $2,000 in labor to save an extra day, it’s more than worth it.
A classmate asked about balancing crashing against a management reserve. Basically should the money to crash a project come from contingency “uh oh” funds or should they be saved. In my opinion it depends on the project’s timing. If the project is nearing completion and most of the risk points identified during the planning phase have already passed, then spending the reserves means the schedule speeds up but the budget is unaffected, which makes the customer happy. But if the project is early in its execution and there are still many potential risks, then I think the overall budget should be increased, leaving the “uh oh” money intact should the project need it. The contingency money is there so the budget doesn’t increase with manifested risks. If the risks are behind you, spend the extra money, but if the risks are yet to come save it in case they’re realized.