Discuss methods for shortening a project schedule. What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of shortening project schedules? There are a couple of methods that can be used for shortening a project schedule, some of those methods are crashing, and fast tracking. The book defines crashing as a technique for making cost and schedule trade-offs to obtain the greatest amount of schedule compression for the least incremental cost. The book also defines fast tracking as doing activities in parallel that you would normally do in sequence. There are some benefits of crashing as well as fast tracking but there is some drawback from each of them. The advantage of crashing is that it shortens the time that is needed to finish the project, but the drawback for using crashing is that it often increases the cost of the entire project that the team is working on. It increases the cost of the project because it uses more resources to shorten the schedule of the project. Just like crashing there are benefits and drawbacks for fast tracking as well. Fast tracking can shorten the time that is needed to complete the project but its biggest disadvantage is that it has the ability to extend the time rather than shorten it because some tasks are started too soon in the chain and they might be the tasks that needed to be started after a certain task. An example of this would be washing your car, if you fast track then you will start to dry the car before you finish washing the car and you will start waxing the car before you finish drying the car