The rationale behind the steps shown in the process chart is that you first have to find the critical tasks to determine which tasks drive the project duration. If you have MS Project highlight the Critical Path in red you can easily see whether a task is critical or not. If the Critical Path switches to another parallel path while you are optimizing, MS Project will immediately highlight the new Critical Path in red, MS Project continues to show you which tasks are critical.

1. Highlight the Critical Path

2. Sort the tasks based on duration

3. Find the longest critical task

4. Make a change on it

5. Consider impacts on quality, scope and time

6. Decide whether you want to keep the change

7. Repeat steps 3 7

Then you find out what critical tasks have the longest durations by sorting the tasks. The critical tasks with the longest durations hold the greatest opportunity for saving time. In other words: Don't sweat the small stuff! Focus on the long durations that allow you to achieve the largest gains first.

After that, you have to come up with a way to do the work faster. We will suggest methods and explain them. Before you decide to go on to the next longest critical task, you have to establish whether the change helped you enough, or if the tradeoffs on quality or scope were too high a price to pay.

1. Highlight the Critical Path

2. Sort the tasks based...