Discuss any five approaches to reducing the critical path. Which is the most effective and which is the most difficult to achieve? Why?

What will be an ideal response?

The text presents eight ways to reduce the critical path; answers will vary as to the most effective and most difficult to achieve depending on circumstances and students' intellectual capital. The alternatives presented are:
Eliminate tasks on the critical path — tasks can be dropped or moved to non-critical paths, thereby shortening the critical path.
Re-plan serial paths to be in parallel — if serial activities are converted to concurrent activities, project length can be reduced.
Overlap sequential tasks — laddering is a good method for overlapping sequential activities.
Shorten the duration on critical path tasks — if these tasks were improperly estimated, then the project length can be reduced.
Shorten early tasks — the logic here is that these tasks are more certain, being in the near future and such certainty can be taken advantage of by time reduction.
Shorten longest tasks — the longest tasks may have the same percentage padding and, as a result, the greatest amount of time that can be cut.
Shorten easiest tasks — duration estimates for the easiest tasks can be deflated without an adverse impact on the project team's work.
Shorten tasks that cost the least to speed up — crashing critical path activities by throwing money at them should be performed with a budget and conscience.