Theory of Constraints Handbook - James Cox Iii [753]
3Volume 1 of The Theory of Constraints Journal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Robert E. Fox (1987) was published.
4The distribution solutions are initially mentioned in It’s Not Luck (Goldratt, 1994) and later in Necessary but Not Sufficient (Goldratt, 2000).
5Single project critical chain is detailed in Critical Chain (Goldratt, 1997).
6The Thinking Processes have been utilized in numerous areas besides businesses, including areas such as personal situations (see Chapter 38), education (see Chapter 26), and prisons (see Chapter 27).
7The sessions are Operations, Finance and Measurements, Project Management and Engineering, Distribution and Supply Chain, Marketing, Achieving Buy-in and Sales, Managing People, and Strategy and Tactics.
8The red curve-green curve concept is discussed in detail in Session Eight Strategy and Tactics of the Goldratt Satellite Program.
9The S&T trees for each of the five environments (Make-to-Order (Reliable Rapid Response), Make-to-Availability (Consumer Goods), Projects, Retailer, Pay-per-Click) can be accessed and downloaded for viewing with the Harmony viewer at: http://www.goldrattresearchlabs.com/bin/Harmony_Viewer_ 0.9.13.5.exe
10Two of the series (Goldratt, 2008; 2009) have been completed to date.
1It should be noted that when a project is rescheduled because an activity is finished late, the start and finish of the remaining activities are pushed into the future, as is the project completion.
1The Project Management Institute was founded in 1969 and in the past 40 years has grown into the world’s leading project management organization with nearly 500,000 members and credential holders in 180 + countries. http://www.pmi.org/AboutUs/Pages/default.aspx, accessed September 5, 2009.
2“The complexity class of decision problems that are intrinsically harder than those that can be solved by a nondeterministic Turing machine in polynomial time. When a decision version of a combinatorial optimization problem is proven to belong to the class of NP-complete problems, which includes well-known problems such as satisfiability, traveling salesman, the bin packing problem, etc., then the optimization version is NP-hard.” (Algorithms and Theory of Computation Handbook, 1999, 19–26.) That is, there is no way to identify an optimal solution that includes both a critical path and leveled resources. This fact, however, does not mean that a satisfactory solution cannot be found.
3If you are new to the field of project management, you might find it helpful to review the section in Chapter 2 on the “Development of a Project Network.” That section discusses the use of concepts from the Theory of Constraints to surface potential obstacles to the successful completion of the project. Chapter 3 assumes that all the steps outlined in that section have been accomplished and all activities, including “assumed activities” have been identified.
4In traditional project management circles, these terms were developed after the introduction of CC buffers.
5These two terms, “path” and “chain,” are used interchangeably.
6A matrix structure is one in which people report to more than one superior.
7Leveling of resources on a project is now a fairly common practice and such a schedule sometimes is referred to as a resource-constrained critical path schedule in traditional project management circles.
8Occasionally, a task consumes almost the full amount of task time allocated and the task time therefore