Do you believe in the evaluation process to determine critical success factors in the WBS or Network Flow of a project?  This can be a key decision tree tool for reducing the need for number of procedures associated with a work stream.  In 2001, we were implementing a project that required 250 manual steps coordinated between 3 resources in an effort to provide a technology transition.  Because of the complexity of these steps, we ended up failing in our first migration.  From that point forward, we had to crash the process in order to provide a timeframe that could accommodate faster return time.  CSF was used to commit to automation and precedence screening in an effort to reduce singular steps and move more so toward parallelism.  The objective was to reduce the number of process steps and resources by identifying CSF in the overall process, defining them as key stages that cannot change and crashing any activity that proceeded it with an eye for dependencies.  Without this learning, we would not have been able to reduce the time to migrate and achieve a 3 hour cut over vs. 10 hours.