Fast-tracking vs crashing

Let work pile up when we're busy with multiple projects of varying sizes is easy. It's even easier to forget about obligations and commitments in our personal lives. However, planning for various contingencies and scheduling our time can help us avoid these issues.

Fast-tracking and crashing are techniques of schedule compression through which we can avoid the issues. Before moving forward to fast-tracking and Crashing, let's briefly know about schedule comparison.

Schedule Compression Definition

Schedule compression reduces a project's duration by speeding up the project team and resources. This can be done by increasing the number of working hours or by decreasing the number of holidays and other non-working days.

Schedule compression is an integral part of project management because it allows you to shorten the duration of your projects. Therefore, schedule compression is the answer if you want to deliver your products or services faster. However, there are some downsides to using this technique.

The main benefit of schedule compression is that it allows you to deliver projects faster than they would have been born without reduction.

What is Fast-Tracking?

Fast-tracking is a project management technique used when a project is needed to accelerate the completion of a project. Fast-tracking can be used when problems with the originally scheduled completion date or when it becomes clear that the original date is not achievable.

Fast-tracking can be applied to one project or several phases at once. However, it involves adding resources and reducing the scope to complete the project on time.

It can also be applied at any project's life cycle stage. Still, it is most commonly used during the early stages of development when costs are lower. Risks may be more significant if action is not taken quickly.

What is crashing?

Crashing is a technique used to fast-track a project if you've run out of time with regular fast-tracking. You add more people to the project, but since they're working less per hour than the other team members, their salary will be cheaper than additional people.

Their time will be more affordable than regular employees'. However, Crashing can be expensive because you're paying all these extra people, so you have to find activities that save the most time while costing the least money.

You categorize your actions by the lowest cost per unit time, called crash cost. Then you look at which activities will bring the most value while costing the least money.

The results of a crash analysis are usually presented in a crash graph, where activities with the flattest slope are considered first—these lead to an equal amount of time savings but have a minor increase in cost.

Comparison between Fast Tracking and Crashing

Fast-tracking is a technique used in software development whereby a project is accelerated by adding resources to the project team. The main benefit of fast-tracking is that it reduces the time taken to complete a project and allows for earlier release dates.

On the other hand, Crashing is mainly used in software development, which involves adding more people to a task to complete it quickly. Therefore, Crashing can effectively get things done quickly, but there are also disadvantages associated with this project control method. These include:

• Less experienced team members may be unable to keep up with the pace required by crashing. This may result in poor quality work or, even worse, poor quality code, which can cause problems later on down the line!
• There will not be enough time for testing, meaning that any bugs discovered during testing may have already been missed by the developers who have written them!

Fast-tracking also means more resources will be required to complete the project in time. Therefore, it can be implemented only if there are enough resources available within the organization.

Compared to Crashing, Fast Tracking is less labor intensive as it does not require much overtime work from your team members. In contrast, Crashing involves a lot of overtime work from your team members, which may lead to burnout and high-stress levels among them.

The main difference between fast-tracking and Crashing is that Crashing focuses on shortening cycle times while fast-tracking directions create high-quality products as quickly as possible with limited resources.

When to use fast tracking and crashing in a project

Fast-tracking is useful when working on a project with a deadline, and there is no time to do it all by the book. For example, suppose you need to create a website for your business but don't have the time to design it from scratch. In that case, you can use an existing template and customize it yourself instead of paying someone else to do it for you.

There are a few situations where you can use Crashing:

When you want to get rid of some code that is no longer needed. For example, if you have a method used only in one place but isn't called, it still needs to be there. If you don't want to delete the code but don't want it in your program, you can use a crash to remove it.

Suppose you have a method that crashes and wants to test how your program handles this situation. For example, you could ensure that any exception information is logged correctly or displayed in an error dialog box.

Conclusion

Now you know about the two techniques of schedule comparison and their difference. Also, when to use these two techniques, we're sure you'll soon begin to see results in no time.