The project is late. Now what?
Crash, fast-track, cut scope or move the date. Each costs something, and the arithmetic shows which ones actually move the finish — including the ones that cost money and buy nothing.
The project is late. What are the options?
Each recovery option costs something — money, scope, risk, or someone's weekend. This compares them side by side and refuses to pretend any of them is free.
The plan as it stands
Recovery options
Each row is one lever within one option. Group levers by giving them the same option name. Shorten an activity by entering the days you would remove from it.
Options compared
How each option is evaluated
Every option is applied to a copy of the plan and re-run through a full CPM pass. The baseline is never modified, so the options are all measured against the same starting point.
Removing days from a non-critical activity does nothing to the finish date. That is the most common wasted recovery action, and it shows here as an option that costs money and moves nothing.
The critical path is recomputed for each option, so an option that shortens one chain until a different one governs stops gaining, and the comparison shows where that happened.
Nothing here scores risk. Fast-tracking and overtime carry real costs that arithmetic cannot weigh, so they are recorded as notes against the option rather than folded into a number.
Most recovery effort is spent in the wrong place
When a project is late the instinct is to accelerate whatever looks most troubled. That work is frequently not on the critical path, and shortening it changes the finish date by nothing at all.
Every option here is measured against a recomputed critical path, so an action that costs money and buys no time shows up as exactly that. It is a common and expensive pattern, and it is invisible without the arithmetic.
The four levers, and what each really costs
Crash — buy time with money: more people, overtime, expedited delivery. Predictable, and the marginal day gets steadily dearer.
Fast-track — overlap work that was sequential. Often cheap in money and genuinely risky, because the overlapped work proceeds on assumptions that the earlier work was going to confirm.
Cut scope — the only lever that reliably works, and the only one requiring someone with authority to say no. It is also the one people reach for last.
Move the date — always available, rarely popular, and frequently the cheapest option once the alternatives are costed honestly.
Adding people to a late project
Worth stating because the arithmetic here will happily model it: adding people mid-project costs weeks of onboarding drawn from the people who are already busy, and the productive capacity often falls before it rises.
This tool models the schedule effect you specify, not that second-order cost. If an option involves a substantial team increase, treat the modelled gain as optimistic.
Sustained overtime is borrowing
Overtime buys real days in the first fortnight. Beyond that, output per hour falls, defect rates rise, and the recovery plan starts creating the rework it was meant to avoid.
A recovery plan resting on months of overtime is not a plan, it is a deferral — and it usually defers into a worse position than the one it was fixing.