What are the three principal methods for accelerating a project and under what circumstances might these methods yield little gain?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

There are three principal methods for crashing project activities:
Improving the productivity of existing project resources;
Changing the working method employed for the activity, usually by altering the technology and types of resources employed;
Increasing the quantity of project resources, including personnel, plant and equipment.
In order to improve the productivity of existing project resources, the project manager must find more efficient ways to work with the people, equipment, and materials. More efficiency means less waste and there are few that would argue that waste is beneficial. The project manager may change the working method by altering technology or resources types. Increased automation, more powerful equipment, and more senior personnel might all be deployed to accelerate the project. The author indicates that the most common method for shortening activity durations involves the decision to increase project resources, either by working the current resources for longer hours or by adding to the number of resources in the pool. A feature common to all of these approaches is that at some point the resources will stretch to their limit and the marginal gain will be prohibitively expensive, even to the point that any efforts to squeeze another fraction from them will yield negative results. Changes in the middle of a project might disrupt project team harmony, throwing them off of a learning curve and adversely affect team morale.