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Critical Path

The Critical Path view runs Critical Path Method (CPM) analysis over your project's activities. It computes the critical path — the chain of activities that determines the project's earliest finish date — and the slack (float) available on every activity. Anything on the critical path has zero slack: if it slips, the whole project slips.

Sidebar location: Track → Critical Path (/projects/critical-path).

What you see

  • The critical path: the connected sequence of activities with zero slack.
  • Slack / float per activity, so you can tell how much room each non-critical activity has before it becomes critical.
  • Earliest and latest start/finish timing for each activity.

How activities reference each other

Activities depend on one another by their friendly task codes (for example, TASK-000002), not internal IDs. When you set up dependencies, you point an activity at the code of its predecessor. The analysis walks those references to build the network and compute the path.

Optional PERT estimates

CPM can run on fixed durations or on PERT three-point estimates (optimistic / most-likely / pessimistic). Where activities carry three-point estimates, the analysis uses the PERT-weighted duration; where they do not, it falls back to the fixed duration.

Walkthrough

  1. Open Track → Critical Path. The view computes the critical path and slack from your current activities.
  2. Read the highlighted critical path — the activities driving the finish date.
  3. Check slack on the remaining activities. Activities with low (but non-zero) slack are near-critical: a small slip can pull them onto the critical path.
  4. Adjust dependencies or durations on the Gantt Chart and return here to recompute.

AI Assistant prompts

Summarize the current critical path and explain why each activity is on it.

Which activities have the least slack and are most likely to become critical?

Recommend three actions focused on the critical path to protect the finish date.

Tips

  • Watch near-critical activities. Low-slack activities are the ones most likely to surprise you.
  • Recompute after every plan change. Adding a dependency or changing a duration can move the critical path.
  • Pair with Monte Carlo. The deterministic critical path tells you today's driver; Schedule Risk tells you how often each activity drives the schedule across many scenarios.

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