Who Stole My Critical Path?

Recently, I received a call from one of our customers saying that she can’t see her critical path. This problem is quite common in complex schedules. In this blog I would like to share some quick troubleshooting techniques.

1. The first thing that you can try is simply going to the “Format” tab and click on the check box called “Critical Tasks”.

1. Other option is to browse under the “View” tab and under the “Tasks View” section and “Gantt Chart” dropdown, select “Tracking Gantt”.

1. If neither of the above options seem to work, then insert a new column called “Critical”.  Here, you will be able to see values Yes/No based on whether the task is critical or not. If you see all tasks marked as “No” except for Task 0 then clearly it means that there is a linking issue.
   • Make sure that all your tasks have predecessors. In cases where having a predecessor does not logically make sense, use soft constraints instead.
   • Remove links to inactive tasks and replace it with links to active tasks.

Thanks for reading!