There are many good reasons for attempting to reduce the duration of a project.
One of the more important reasons today is time to market. Intense global competition
and rapid technological advances have made speed a competitive advantage.
To succeed, companies have to spot new opportunities, launch project teams,
and bring new products or services to the marketplace in a flash. Perhaps in no industry
does speed matter as much as in the electronics industry. For example, a
rule of thumb for moderate- to high-technology firms is that a six-month delay in
bringing a product to market can result in a loss of market share of about 35 percent.
In these cases, high-technology firms typically assume that the time savings
and avoidance of lost profits are worth any additional costs to reduce time without
any formal analysis. See the Snapshot from Practice: Cell-Phone Wars for
more on this