Critical Chain Project Management

Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) is the first major advance in Project Management principles since the 1950's.  A new paradigm for project management, Critical Chain in the form of Critical Chain Project Management provides a highly sophisticated way to plan and manage risk and reduce project schedules. Planning and tracking will be easier. You will get more done in less time and complete projects faster. Critical Chain Project Management has two parts: It applies to individual projects, and it applies to managing the entire set of projects in an organization.

What is Critical Chain Project Management?

• The first really new way to manage projects in forty years.
• A better way to achieve project success: scope, cost, and schedule.
• A way to reduce project duration by one half or more.
• Reduced stress for project teams and managers.
• Focuses on the uncertainties in any project
• Centered around finding the constraints & arranging everything around them
• Addresses single-project scheduling and identifies the shortest time that a project can be delivered considering both task and resources dependencies

Critical Chain Project Management is the name of the breakthrough approach to scheduling and managing projects developed by Eli Goldratt in 1990. A significant advance over PERT/ CPM, which has been the dominant approach to PM for more than 50 years, Critical Chain Project Management addresses some of the most damaging phenomena in managing projects, including the cascade effect, Parkinson’s law, and multi-tasking, which drive projects to miss delivery dates, exceed budgets, and take longer than they should. What make the approach so successful are its four essential elements.

• Schedules are level-loaded based on the limitations of available resources (constraints). This produces the “critical chain”—the longest set of sequential tasks (due to both task dependency, and resource contention)—which dictates the shortest overall project duration.
• Time buffers are inserted at strategic locations in the plan—at the end of the critical chain and at every point where a task intersects the critical chain—to absorb the adverse effects of uncertainty without damaging performance. To create the buffers, some of the slack time built into tasks in planning is repositioned to these strategic locations.
• Projects are “pipelined” or staged based on resource availability to combat the cascade effect of shared resources across projects and create viable multi-project plans.
• Buffer management is used to dynamically set task priorities in execution. As uncertainty changes the original plan, tasks are prioritized based on the buffer burn rate (the amount of buffer consumed vs. the percent of the work complete). Tasks with critical buffer penetration take precedence over those with lower burn rates.

Critical Chain Project Management is enabling organizations to complete more projects faster with the same or fewer resources. The typical business results realized are:

• On-time completion of projects nearing 100% (with no reduction in scope)
• Project durations reduced 20-60%
• Volume of projects increased 25-100%

In terms of operational benefits, companies are reporting:

• Better visibility of risk and faster overall response to problems
• Clearer, more stable priorities
• Stronger focus and more effective use of resources
• Less overall administration effort, with better, more up to date information

For most organizations Critical Chain Project Management requires a shift in three areas:

• Measurement- Common measures like earned value focus on completing any work on a project—whether it is on the Critical Chain or not. This drives the completion of “easier tasks” often at the expense of ones more critical to overall project completion. Similarly a focus on task completion dates encourages task estimates to be padded, reduces the urgency to start a task when it becomes available, and provides no protection for the project when a delay does occur. Critical Chain Project Management works when an organization manages according to its buffers and evaluates overall performance based on the rate at which resources consume or recover the buffer.
• Information- The information companies need to make Critical Chain Project Management work is different from conventional methods. While many conventional systems can level load resources, none has the facility to place buffers appropriately, or to provide dynamic information regarding buffer burn rates. There are a very small number of systems that even claim to be able to handle these challenges.
• Decision processes- To get different results, different decisions must be made—which means engraining new processes in the organization. These processes can be well defined and readily taught to key managers.

Critical Chain Project Management is based on:

• Common sense and reality
• How people work most effectively
• Using information effectively
• Minimum schedule complexity that gets the job done with acceptable risk
• Proven Theory of Constraints philosophy put to another practice use
• Simple, proven methods
• Software that makes Critical Chain Project Management accessible by everyone
• One project alone, or multiple projects sharing resources

Critical Chain Project Management does not:

• Require ideal scenarios, not perfect data
• Make people work like robots to impossible standards of perfection
• Create information overload, nor information vacuum, nor out of date reports
• Create analysis paralysis, nor a huge bureaucracy overhead
• Depend on impractical nor untested ideas
• Require project management specialists, nor “rocket science”
• Have proprietary technology nor algorithms, everything is “open source”
• Limit your flexibility nor responsiveness, it them