PERT Diagraming in Lucid
PERT diagramming is a project management tool used to schedule, organize, and coordinate tasks within a project. It graphically represents the sequence of tasks and their dependencies, showing the critical path and estimated timelines. This method helps in analyzing potential bottlenecks and ensuring timely project completion.
Historically individuals would write out the tasks and corresponding duration times on little cards then spread them across the room, they would then need to do mental math to calculate the start, finish and slack for every card. With a large process with many hundred steps that could be hours of monotonous math. Then if any cards are moved in position all the upstream and downstream calculations need to be adjusted.
Enter Lucid, with the power of Lucid’s powerful formula system. These cards can be calculated instantly by mapping dependency lines. This means all those hours of math calculations disappear! And when a card needs to be moved or adjusted there’s no need to rerun the math on all downstream items, teams that move to Lucid for their PERT diagraming save weeks of time by using Lucid instead of manual PERT cards.
But lets kick it up a notch, using the power of conditional formatting Lucid can automatically calculate the critical path of the process you built, creating a powerful visualization into the bottlekneck that can be addressed to improve a process. This saves additional time as team would normally have to manually compare all descendant cards along a stream in order to ensure you had identified the correct critical path, and then, if any cards needed to move in a later discussion you’d need to recheck the slack numbers on each card to identify the new critical path. Lucid does this instantly.
In truth this is just a sliver of what Lucid can do, additional features includes being able to add departmental breakdowns of work across the months in which work is placed or abstracting the current process against potential new alignments to create “Score cards” that evaluate potential efficiencies and cost savings.
If you are interested in how your team could save hours of time with a solution like this talk to your Lucid Account team and see how Lucid’s Professional Services team could build a solution like this for you.
