Mini whiteboards lead to more motivating Critical Path Analysis

CPA is probably my favourite topic to teach. I love it. This idea is not a magic bullet, but is a way to make it slightly easier. Who came up with this idea? One of my students….

I like to operate a slightly ‘Kaizen’ approach to my teaching. I always ask my students what they thought of an activity or how they think they would learn something better. I asked this question recently after teaching CPA and one of them came up with this really simple idea.

What I find is that when students first start to draw the diagrams, they end up in a right mess. Crossing things out, making changes, re-doing the est’s in the nodes etc etc. There notes look awful. How can they revise from that?

One of my students said that I should buy some fine liner pens and get them to draw the diagrams on the mini-whiteboards first. Then, if they get anything wrong, they simply rub it out and start again. Once I have checked their network and it is correct, they can copy it into their notes and they have a sparkling network diagram to revise from. Not only that, they have went back through it, consolidating their learning. Genius.

Can’t take the credit for this one, but it just shows that Kaizen actually does work, as long as you have a ‘motivated workforce’

Enjoy.