Chapter 20. On a Crash Course
Crashing turned out to be tedious, even though the name made it sound exciting. We rolled Amanda's computer into the conference room, taped a printout of the dependency chart to the wall, and went to work. Everyone on the assignment team was there, as well as some of our "technical" experts" like Mark and Luigi.
The need to focus on the critical path made the choice of where to start simple. The tedious part was inputting changes, recalculating the schedules, finding the new critical path, and starting all over again on a new activity. We also had to save every combination of possible shortened schedules, and keep track of them for evaluation purposes. Once we added in potential scope changes, we created a myriad of combinations.
By 9:30 a.m. we had stopped creating new scenarios and started evaluating the ones we had, because at 10 I was supposed to have an answer for Ralph. When he and the others showed up at the door, I was sure I had an option that he couldn't turn down.
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