Demystifying the Benefits of Fast Tracking in Project Management

Fast tracking in project management refers to various schedule compression techniques used to shorten the overall duration of a project timeline by overlapping phases or activities that would normally be done in sequence. This allows certain elements of the project scope to happen concurrently rather than consecutively.

In this comprehensive guide, we'll demystify everything you need to know about fast tracking, including what it is, the benefits and risks, how it compares to crashing, tips for successful implementation, and more. By the end, you'll have a clear understanding of how experienced project managers can leverage fast tracking to accelerate project schedules and delivery when needed.

What is Fast Tracking in Project Management?

Fast tracking, also referred to as schedule compression or concurrency, is an important technique used in project management to shorten the total length of the project delivery timeline. It does this by conducting phases or activities in parallel that would normally have to be done sequentially in a traditional linear project execution.

This intentional overlap allows certain predecessor tasks to progress concurrently with their successor tasks, rather than forcing them to wait for preceding tasks to be fully complete before starting work. The goal is to find opportunities to start successor work with an acceptable amount of predecessor work finished, even if all the predecessor work isn't done.

For example, instead of completing the entire project design phase before beginning any construction work, fast tracking allows elements of the construction phase to commence once there is adequate initial design completed to inform foundational construction activities. This effectively compresses the overall project schedule duration by running select phases and workstreams in parallel.

Fast tracking is one of the schedule compression tools and techniques commonly used in project management, along with crashing which aims to shorten project duration by adding resources to reduce individual activity durations. It's important to note that fast tracking focuses on overlapping macro schedule phases and milestones, while crashing targets reducing the duration of micro schedule activities.

The Strategic Benefits of Fast Tracking a Project

There are several compelling strategic benefits that make fast tracking a potentially advantageous technique:

• Accelerate overall project delivery: Fast tracking can substantially shorten the total duration of the project timeline by overlapping independent, but traditionally sequential phases, milestones, and workstreams. This acceleration enables faster completion of the entire project.

• Meet imposed project deadlines: Fast tracking gives project managers a viable option to meet tight deadlines, aggressive launch targets, or market release commitments that have been dictated by management, customers, or competitors.

• Recover delayed project schedules: Fast tracking can be an effective technique for bringing a project back on track and recovering delays if it has fallen behind the original baseline schedule and is missing key interim milestones or the final completion date target.

• Seize fleeting market opportunities: Shortening the project timeline through fast tracking means you may be able to deliver the product, service, or capability faster in order to capitalize on critical time-sensitive opportunities, competitive openings, or other windows in the marketplace.

• Enhance cost efficiencies: Completing the entire scope of the project in a shorter timeline can also lower overhead costs associated with operations, resources, and other indirect expenditures that drag on longer project durations.

• Respond to priority shifts: Fast tracking adds important agility and flexibility to re-baseline project schedules when business needs or product priorities shift, requiring an accelerated delivery.

In essence, fast tracking is a strategic tool used by experienced project managers who need to accelerate overall project schedules and complete projects in the shortest responsible timeframe possible when circumstances require it.

How Does Fast Track Scheduling Work?

The mechanics of fast track scheduling work by thoroughly analyzing the project schedule network diagram to identity all options for condensing the schedule through parallel or concurrent execution of work rather than forced sequential phases. Typically this involves:

• Closely analyzing the project schedule network diagram and critical path to fully understand predecessor-successor dependencies between schedule activities and work packages.

• Identifying any activities or deliverables that are not tightly coupled dependencies and which present options for conducting work concurrently.

• Creating a fast tracked project schedule that allows those independent elements to occur simultaneously and in parallel by overlapping traditional phase boundaries.

• Aggressively implementing the newly condensed fast track schedule and timeline to complete the project at the accelerated pace.

• Applying increased project oversight, governance, and risk control processes given the inherent risks associated with schedule compression.

For example, on a complex construction project to build a new 20-story downtown office building, instead of waiting until 100% of architectural and engineering design is complete before beginning any construction activities, you would strategically start initial construction such as excavation and foundation work as soon as the design for those foundational components is adequately finalized. This allows critical path construction activities to gain progress in parallel rather than waiting idle for the full design phase to finish first. Detailed design can continue concurrently with initial construction in a fast track model.

The key is to find and exploit opportunities across the project schedule network to pull certain predecessor workstreams into parallel workflows with their successor workstreams in order to gain schedule compression. This forces concurrency over imposed phase sequencing and eliminates built-in delays from preceding dependencies, ultimately driving an accelerated project delivery.

Who Uses Project Fast Tracking Techniques?

Fast tracking is primarily employed as a schedule compression technique by experienced project managers who are highly skilled in project planning, scheduling, and execution. They are seeking ways to accelerate completion of large, complex projects within constrained budgets and deadlines.

Fast tracking is especially common in industries where speed to market, product launch, or service delivery is a critical competitive factor, such as:

• Construction - to expedite building projects within tight market windows amidst labor/material constraints.

• Software development - to release software products and updates faster to meet market demand.

• Marketing - to deliver time-sensitive campaigns and initiatives on highly aggressive launch schedules.

• New product development - to accelerate researching, designing, testing and launching new products to market rapidly.

It tends to be used selectively in larger, more complex projects where there are sufficient workstreams and discrete project phases that can be intelligently overlapped to take advantage of concurrent execution opportunities. Less complex projects with tightly coupled scheduling dependencies and fewer phases tend to offer very limited fast tracking potential.

Experienced project managers also understand both the advantages and risks associated with schedule compression techniques like fast tracking, so they are best equipped to determine where fast tracking can be applied prudently and effectively balanced against project variables like quality, resources, and cost.

Strategic Situations to Consider Fast Tracking

While fast tracking is not universally appropriate, there are certain situations where it is strategically advisable to consider fast tracking as an option:

• The project status indicates the current schedule is falling behind and the project is at risk of missing key interim milestones or the ultimate completion deadline. Fast tracking may offer a viable technique to regain lost time and get the timeline back on track.

• Management has imposed an extremely aggressive, non-negotiable deadline for the project that requires substantially condensing the original realistic schedule duration in order to meet the imposed timeline constraint.

• The competitive climate or market dynamics indicate time-to-market and launching the product/service delivery rapidly are critical success factors, so there is urgency to expedite the overall project as much as responsibly possible.

• Delayed project completion could result in major lost opportunity costs, substantial financial penalties, reputational damage, or loss of competitive standing. Accelerated delivery translates directly into business value.

• Evolving customer needs or sudden changes in organizational priorities have created a new mandate to deliver the project outcomes much faster than originally planned and scheduled.

• The traditional linear phased schedule contains long lead time gaps between consecutive phases that signal potential to achieve significant compression by overlapping those phases for concurrent execution.

• Additional financial resources may be available to expand project capacity if needed to enable effective parallelization of project phases without compromising quality.

In essence, fast tracking becomes especially relevant when accelerated schedule compression is truly imperative, but additional budget to pay for crashing activities is unavailable. In that case, fast tracking presents the best option to meet aggressive deadlines.

Potential Risks and Limitations of Fast Tracking

While fast tracking offers the advantage of substantially shorter project durations, project managers must carefully weigh a number of inherent risks and limitations:

• Reduced understanding of requirements: Compressing project timelines sharply curtails the upfront time available to capture detailed requirements and validate understanding before design commences. This often leads to serious gaps in requirements definition or costly changes arising late in execution.

• Increased uncertainty and unpredictability: High schedule compression forces projects to progress with far less predictability, control, and management oversight compared to a properly paced timeline.

• Lower work quality: The accelerated, overlapping schedule pressure jeopardizes delivery quality for both individual activities and integrated work products.

• Cost escalations: The rework, waste, and change orders often arising from the ripple effects of overlapping subsequent phases before predecessor work is truly complete tends to increase total project costs.

• Overloaded resources: Insufficient project team staffing paired with increased simultaneity of project workstreams strains resources and often leads to task overload conditions for individuals or groups.

• Misaligned priorities: The intense focus on condensing the schedule above all else means proper planning, requirements definition, resource forecasting, and work quality frequently suffer in favor of progress for the sake of schedule.

• Unmitigated overlapping dependencies: Fast tracked schedules still collapse if accelerated predecessor activities fall severely behind because successors are blocked without completed prerequisites.

• Infeasible execution scenarios: In some cases fast tracking timelines are simply unrealistic regardless of overlap; the work itself mandates more time for proper, quality completion.

Having a clear-eyed perspective on these very real limitations enables project managers to enact the necessary mitigations and manage risks wisely. Before pursuing fast tracking, they must carefully assess if it can truly deliver the expected schedule benefits or simply create uncontrolled downstream impacts.

How Does Fast Tracking Differ From Crashing?

While both fast tracking and crashing aim to compress project schedules, they employ very different techniques:

Fast Tracking Techniques

• Shortens project duration by overlapping long-lead phases to allow parallel workflows

• Seeks to eliminate built-in phase delays through concurrent execution

• Primarily impacts project schedule constraints

• Achieves acceleration without added direct costs

Crashing Techniques

• Shortens project duration by reducing short-duration activities by adding resources

• Adds more team bandwidth to complete work faster

• Primarily impacts project budget constraints

• Requires increasing costs to buy shorter durations 

The choice between fast tracking versus crashing depends entirely on whether schedule or budget flexibility exists. Fast tracking aims to shorten the overall schedule with no direct cost increase, while crashing shortens the schedule by adding financial costs to buy faster completion of activities.

Project managers choose between the two techniques based on whether funding is available to pay for the additional resources required to crash activities. If incremental budget is available, crashing is likely the best fit. If budgets are capped, fast tracking is generally the only viable option.

Another common technique is to combine the two - fast track the project schedule as much as possible for free compression, then crash only the most critical activities where budget exists to fund their acceleration. This provides maximum compression within the cost-schedule tradeoff.

Tips and Best Practices for Effective Fast Tracking

If fast tracking is chosen as the right schedule compression technique for a project, here are some proven tips and best practices to drive effective implementation:

• Conduct comprehensive schedule analysis - Leverage project scheduling tools to thoroughly analyze the network diagram, critical path, workstream dependencies, predecessor-successor relationships, resource loading, and schedule risks to fully understand fast tracking options.

• Define clear transition points - Determine formal stage gates and completion criteria at phase shift points to control the transition between overlapped phases. Well-defined exits and entry checks ensure continued alignment.

• Increase project oversight - Tighten change control, requirements management, risk/issue tracking, team communications, steering committee reviews and other governance processes to coordinate accelerated progress.

• Prioritize quality execution - Refuse to blindly sacrifice proper planning, requirements definition, reviews, testing, and validation just to gain accelerated progress - controlled speed is necessary for quality and risk management.

• Control scope creep - Freezing scope change is especially critical on fast tracked projects when accelerating the timeline. Scope creep erodes the schedule benefits.

• Watch resource loads closely- Schedule compression strains resources. Ensure sufficient project team staffing and bandwidth to prevent individual or group overloading as workstreams overlap under aggressive time pressure.

• Assess progress continuously - Routinely validate that fast tracking techniques are actually compressing the schedule as planned and enabling the required acceleration with acceptable quality. Adjust if not.

With the right governance and execution rigor, fast tracking can achieve substantial schedule compression without uncontrolled impacts - delivering projects faster while also mastering risks.

Key Takeaways and Summary Points

• Fast tracking aims to shorten project duration through intentional overlap and concurrency rather than rigid sequential phasing.

• Overlapping long-lead predecessor activities with successor phases compresses schedule.

• Fast tracking is ideal when tight deadlines exist but added budget to crash activities is unavailable.

• Balance speed with quality, cost, and risk impact through rigorous planning, oversight, and governance.

• Compare to crashing which shortens duration by expediting activities using additional budgeted resources.

• Used strategically, fast tracking enables experienced project managers to deliver projects faster to market in order to win.

When deployed skillfully on suitable projects, fast tracking stands as one of the most effective techniques in the project management toolkit to condense schedules without eroding work quality - enabling teams to accelerate delivery of key projects and seize competitive opportunities otherwise lost to calendar delays.