Critical Path

What it is

In project management, there is the concept of the critical path — which is basically the longest route of dependencies for me to get the project done.

Dependencies are like this: paint can’t be done before drywall gets done. Paint is dependent upon drywall being done. And floors are dependent upon paint being done, because you don’t want to put floors down and then paint — then you’d have a situation on your hands where you would absolutely have spray on the floors.

The way I think about it is like making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the morning when I’m packing my kids’ lunches. I also have to bag up veggie straws and cut fruit. All three things have to happen before the lunchbox is done. But the peanut butter and jelly takes the longest. That is the critical path. It doesn’t matter how fast I bag up the veggie straws — if the sandwich isn’t done, they’re not leaving for school.

Why it matters

Throughout these projects, almost always the interior stuff is going to be your critical path. That’s certainly going to take the longest. Usually, you don’t have a lot to do on the exteriors of these houses.

The point of building the phase system was to make the critical path visible so nobody can accidentally go upstream. I had guys doing drywall before the electrical was done — then you’re tearing drywall off to do electrical. That is moving upstream. I had to have a way to stop that from happening.

By building the phases in order, you can’t be in a situation where you put the drywall up before you did something that needed to happen inside the wall. Phase two — mechanical, electrical, plumbing — is done before you touch phase three. That’s how the system is dummy-proof.

How it shows up

On a kitchen remodel, you’ve got cabinets, then countertops, then backsplash, then appliances. In parallel: exterior paint, bathroom remodel. When it’s all done, you can list. The kitchen is the critical path because it takes the longest. That’s where you focus most of your attention. The exterior paint and the bathroom are running alongside it, but they’re not the constraint.

That’s also why I use audibles — moving jobs between phases when there’s a legit reason. If a deck needed to come down and it was the only way to get material into the back of the house, I audible the deck build into phase one. Now I’ve shortened the critical path by solving the access problem early. The phases exist to protect you; the audibles exist to make you efficient once you understand what you’re doing.

On a cosmetic flip, I might collapse the whole thing to two phases. Get through mechanical, electrical, plumbing, then have one contractor do everything else. Way less checkpoints. That’s how I run 20 projects at a time — fewer moves to manage, not more.

Related

larossa system, phases, audible, scope of work, sub chunking, change orders