Critical Path and Timeline
Definition
The critical-path analysis (often the campaign timeline or campaign calendar) makes the plan visible on a calendar: which tasks come first, which depend on which, and which cannot slip without delaying the whole campaign. It is the project-management discipline — borrowed from engineering CPM/PERT practice and adapted for electoral, advocacy, and movement timelines — of naming the chain of dependent tasks whose total duration determines the finish date.
The work has three steps. Decompose the campaign into milestones, then into tasks, then into dependencies. Identify the longest-dependency chain — that chain is the critical path. Protect it from scope creep, concurrent commitments, and the meeting tax that frequently eats the attention of path workers.
Why it matters: most campaigns under-protect the critical path. They pile meetings and side-projects onto the people doing the path work; the path slips; the campaign misses its finish date by exactly the slip it was warned about. Early-warning surfaces live in campaign-project-management and kpis-and-dashboards built around the milestone-at-risk flag. Adjacent terms: campaign-planning, theory-of-change timing assumptions.
Full page: [[critical-path]].