The Importance Of Project Management

A careful and close monitoring of time and cost must be performed to ensure a project is successful. Often, time and cost constraints are common issues with projects especially in construction projects; and if not monitored closely, it can have a devastating result for the project. Moreover, time and cost of projects can mean the difference between successful project completion or delay and added cost to the project. Therefore, a successful project requires detailed analysis of cost and time; project managers must explore ways to reduce time and cost where possible (Eckhart-Queenan, Etzel, & Prasad, 2016). Project managers can mitigate constraints by fast tracking or reducing project scope or when there are no constraints by adding resource

Crashing is a practice of shortening an activity or a project to improve timely completion (Larson & Gray, 2014). Consequently, there is an extra cost associated with crashing, such as extra resources but it is cost well spent in order to complete the project on time or earlier (Klansek & Psunder, 2010). However, in order for crashing to be effective, a review of project cost-duration, as well as activity charts, and graph is critical to identify the crashing point. Further, project managers need to identify the activity which needs to be shortened by applying the following rationale by Larson and Gray (2016), which states, “activity with the smallest increase cost per unit of time” (p.314). In a sample case project where normal costs, normal times, max crash time and crash costs are provided along with the indirect costs for each project duration, a project manager is asked to compute the total project cost for each duration (see Appendix A). Furthermore, the optimum cost time schedule and what is the cost also needs to be computed using the following equation to determine the cost slope. The cost slope is denoted as Cost Slope = Rise/Run = (Crash cost-Normal cost)/(Normal time-Crash time) (Larson & Gray,