• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2670 0

successfully applied in almost every area of human endeavor, from industry to healthcare to education. And while Eli Goldratt is indeed a scientist, an educator, and a business leader, he is first and foremost a philosopher; some say a genius. He is a thinker who provokes others to do the same. Often characterized as unconventional and always stimulating—a slayer of sacred cows—Dr. Goldratt exhorts his readers to examine and reassess their lives and business practices by cultivating a different perspective and a clear new vision.

SECTION II

Critical Chain Project Management

* * *

CHAPTER 2

The Problems with Project Management

CHAPTER 3

A Critical Chain Project Management Primer

CHAPTER 4

Getting Durable Results with Critical Chain—A Field Report

CHAPTER 5

Making Change Stick

CHAPTER 6

Project Management in a Lean World—Translating Lean Six Sigma (LSS) into the Project Environment

* * *

Projects are at the center of change in organizations. They are the vehicles for new product development, major process improvements, organization changes, and the like. Organization strategies therefore depend on projects for their execution making it vital that projects be carried out in the most effective way possible.

As the chapters of this section reveal, Theory of Constraints Critical Chain unlocks a series of new paradigms that enable major advances over traditional methods. New approaches consider availability of critical resources in the timing of new project releases and the planning of individual project schedules. New concepts in task estimating and tracking open the door to intelligently placed protective time buffers enabling managers to focus correctly on specific areas that need attention for project success. Elimination of unnecessary multi-tasking combines with a “relay-runner” approach to work flow to dramatically reduce project execution times and improve project quality. These simple but effective concepts focus management and resource efforts on the vital few tasks that determine organization success.

Key steps to implementation and sustainability are addressed. These techniques and the dramatic improvements in the field are explained. These include huge improvements in completing projects on time, to specification, and within budget. This section gives a clear picture of the Critical Chain concept and how to implement and execute it. Integration of Critical Chain with Lean and Six Sigma is included. While management of individual projects is addressed, special emphasis is put on multi-project environments as these are more pervasive.

CHAPTER 2

The Problems with Project Management

Ed Walker

Introduction

Most projects fail! Failure generally means the actual results of at least one of the three objectives of the project did not meet original expectations. The project scope was reduced (changed the original specifications), the project was delivered late (compared to the original due date), or the budget was exceeded (actual project costs exceeded projected costs). In some projects, two or even all three of these objectives were not realized.

Over the last four decades, two streams of research have emerged from project management. In the management science stream, numerous academic researchers have studied project networks (the theory) to identify specific problems with PERT/CPM (use of the Beta distribution, limited resources, parallel paths, etc.) or to determine the most efficient algorithm to identify the shortest time to complete a project. In the management arena, numerous academic researchers and practitioners have studied the project management environment to identify human problems (lack of project and technical skills, lack of teamwork, lack of communications, etc.) as causes of project failure. Seldom have these researchers acknowledged the work in the other research stream as possible causes for project failure. In many cases, the management scientists only discussed the problem under study as the cause of project failures. What is required, then, is an examination