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Free and Total Slack Time Explanation2

Free and Total Slack Time Explanation2

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52 views2 pages

Free and Total Slack Time Explanation2

Free and Total Slack Time Explanation2

Uploaded by

mbscribd2011
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Free and Total Slack Time Discussion

This discussion will utilize the following Activity on Arrow (AOA) Diagram.

Look in the text for the definition of free and total slack. For the activity Hawk, there are two paths that have to complete before Hawk can begin. The top path takes 4 + 6 = 10 days before Hawk can begin and the next path takes 2 + 5 = 7 days before Hawk can begin. However, the longer path controls when the activity Hawk can begin. Since the top path takes 10 days and the other path before Hawk takes 7 days the second path has 3 days of Free Slack time before Hawk can begin. The question then becomes ,where exactly is the free slack time? Since Goose can finish at day 7 in the project then, we say that Goose has 3 days of Free Slack. This means that Goose can be delayed 3 days without affecting (or changing) the early start date of Hawk. This also implies that Goose could start either 1 or 2 or 3 days past its earliest start and not affect the early start date of ANY immediately succeeding task and, in this example, that is the activity Hawk. Look at the activity Cow. If it is delayed 1 day then this delay will affect (or delay) the early start date of Goose. This means that Cow has no (0 days) free slack, because any delay in Cow will affect the early start date of Goose. Total slack is related to changing the end date of the project. The total slack for Goose is 3 days. This means that you can delay the start of Goose by 3 days and it will not affect (or change) the end date of the project. The total slack for Cow is also three days, since Cow could be delayed and this delay will not affect the end date of the project. (This also means that you would delay the early start of Goose.)

Free and Total Slack Time Discussion


When you draw the AOA diagram, you have a picture that shows the early start date of every activity in the project and the critical path will have 0 slack time. The supporting paths typically have free slack, total slack or both. MS Project will calculate these slack times for you for every activity in your project. Knowing where these slack times appear will help you manage your staff effectively. Looking at the slack time discussed above and if you have one person working on the top path and another person working on the second task, you will notice that you will have three days on the second path where you could assign that staff person to another project. Once you know how long the project will take from MS Project using the early start date for every activity, most likely you would update the schedule and add in time between tasks so that you would have time buffers of extra time available, if you needed additional time in case some of the activities took longer than their estimated time. Look at your AOA diagram and your network diagram from MS Project and verify that these two representations look similar. This is a check you can make to insure you typed in the predecessors in the correct place. Also, look at the calculated free and total slack times on your MS Project Gantt Chart and compare them to your AOA diagram and make sure that you can explain the free and total slack.

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