Critical Path Highlighting

Projects are a complex web of implicit and explicit dependencies. Throw a bunch of different resources into the mix (all working on multiple projects) and it can be hard to see the forest for trees. Critical Path Highlighting is a navigational tool that can help.

To use it, just select the task or container you care about, then go to View > Highlight Critical Path.  Ta-da! Instantly, you'll see all items on the critical path highlighted in yellow. That even includes higher priority items from other projects. Essentially, anything that's driving the end date of the selected item will be called out. If you keep the highlighting turned on, it's a great motivator to the team members whose work is most time-sensitive to stay on track.  

In this example, critical path was turned on for the Webiste Project.  Note that tasks in the higher priority Brochure Project are on the critical path for the Website Project:

If you turn on critical path highlighting for an individual task, we calculate the critical path by taking into account all implicit dependencies (higher priority tasks on the same resource) and explicit dependencies, to decide which items to highlight.

For containers, e.g. a project, we start by looking for all of the tasks that determine (or might determine) the end-date of that project.  We allow for some variance and look for all tasks that end within a small window near the end of the project, as any of these tasks could end up being the critical path. We then take each of these tasks and highlight their critical paths based on implicit and explicit dependencies. This gives a complete critical path for the project as a whole.