Critical Chain Project Management: Motivation & overview

This paper provides an overview of the aspects of Critical Chain that make it successful, and then provides an introduction to Critical Chain and its application. Project Management involves making and keeping commitments under uncertainty, accompanied by complexity and interdependency. In most project management environments, making binding commitments is expected in three separate dimensions: 1) schedule or time, 2) resource or budget, and 3) scope, quality, or performance objectives. Falling short of a commitment can result in the project being deemed a failure, with attendant negative consequences to stakeholders. Evidence suggests a high rate of Project Management failure exists industry-wide. Searching for solutions to the problem of high project failure rates yields many valuable contributions. However, a need remains of finding an approach to project management that is effective across diverse domains, and that can be taught to, and successfully applied by, the majority of project managers of average abilities and experience. A technique called Critical Chain has potential in this regard and is backed by over a decade of field testing and refinement. Critical Chain takes a different approach to handling risk versus most traditional methods of project management such as critical path project management. Traditionally the risk associated with a task is handled by the duration estimate of the individual task. Due to the Student Syndrome and Parkinson's Law this method has not proven to have the desired effect. By utilizing a pooled or aggregated risk methodology, task durations can be shortened to the task's average time to completion, and the variability of the tasks in actuality can be planned for and handled via buffers placed in locations that protect the project as a whole. The buffers utilize the safety time removed from individual tasks. However, it has been found that using more aggressive task durations in conjunction with the buffers results in shorter overall project durations and better on-time performance.