How to Tame a Gorilla Program – SanDisk case study

This article discusses the scheduling of a new product development program at SanDisk, a major designer of Flash Storage products. The program had about 5,000 tasks and 250 cross-project dependencies. The program was considered to be in control when the forecast completion dates of the next major milestone would display a high probability in Monte Carlo simulations of its detailed critical path. The program and particularly the critical path needed to be resource-loaded and leveled. Because of the first-to-market nature of SanDisk’s business, the critical path needed to be as short as possible. This article describes how SanDisk was able to meet these scheduling requirements and maintain an important program in control with the help of some state-of-the-art software from ProjectPro. ProjectPro provided SanDisk with the capability to identify the Resource-Critical Path across subprojects in an integrated program.