ProjectManagement.com - Messages on What are the disadvantages of crashing and fast tracking in construction field?
Home > Discussions > Project Management Central > What are the disadvantages of crashing and fast tracking in construction field?
What are the disadvantages of crashing and fast tracking in construction field?
i want to know about disadvantages of Schedule crashing and fast tracking in construction Management.
based on my experience, due to crashing and fast-tracking you pay more to get something done faster. You buy time by spending money. The balance of schedule and budget is important. In some cases, the quality of work may be compromised.
Rami or Riyadh can provide specific examples or issues, but the general disadvantages of crashing are the law of diminishing returns and increased cost whereas fast tracking increases the risk of rework and potentially other quality concerns. Also, both schedule optimization techniques can only be used for activities which are not fixed duration and for ones where there aren't mandatory dependencies which prevent compression.
You have a combination of distributable tasks that are easy to change the length by adding more people and/or equipment, and others that are difficult to accelerate such as regulatory approvals and processing times. The combination of those and schedule dependencies creates a ton of work for the PM to analyze and adjust when something goes off track. You have the “hurry up and wait” situations with crashing where you might put on another shift to complete drywall, but if the framers can’t keep up, then the drywall crew sits around and waits. Also the more you stack items in parallel and the less float, the more negative impacts when any one thing goes wrong, and there is always more than one thing going wrong. To manage this, the PM gets very busy.
Add in labor unions, and you have a complication of what you could do, vs. what you are allowed to do, and unions can be notoriously inflexible.