Why Critical Chain Project Management

Why would I use Critical Chain Project Management?

If you are currently experiencing projects having problems with schedule, budget and scope along with the common event of people over committing through their own acceptance or by the plans of the project manager. If so then it is definitely worth looking at adopting Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) as a way to speed up the projects and the assure their success.

Projects with problems are often the treated by one of the following actions:

• More detailed planning
• Staff up and put more people on managing the project with a smaller number of tasks to manage.
• Reposition authority and control lower in the organizational structure.
• Continually Re-iterate the plan.
• Implement sophisticated planning models

These along with other possible solutions have been used for years and have always had limited benefits it is NOW time to look at the finding a solution to the problems with old project management models and fix the root cause.

Why Critical Chain Project Management will solve many of these issues?

The main problem with almost all projects is how people manage the uncertainty and risk within individual tasks. In many cases this leads to people hiding the buffer time within tasks and projects being made up of mostly buffer. The other affect of this is that project manager overlaps task knowing that a task is really 4 days work in 10 they add other work in to this time period. Now this increases the chance of failure Due to Student Syndrome (leaving things to the last moment) puts everything at risk as they have work to do for both tasks.

It is harder for the project manager to monitor work when there is buffer like this as the project is possibly on time as there are 4 days left and it is only 10% complete. The approach offered by CCPM is that the task only as the time it should require and to have a total project buffer so that total buffer is managed separately and cannot hide the late running of the tasks.

The other principle that makes Critical Chain Project Management work for me is that it removes the multi tasking of individuals and project resources. Even if you can make sure that project resource is fully focused on the task for half a day (this is hard but possible) and knowing this make a 4 day task work 8 half days it is easier to manage and monitor.

Also if you fully focus on task you can see that you can achieve more and you only need to look at articles by Merlin Mann and other lifehackers, to see the increase in productivity by whole focusing on one thing.
The Behavioral changes that Critical Chain Project Management brings about.

If we believe that the root causes of many projects failing are as a result of the way that people report and manage their time. Coupled with the lack of real visibility that hiding buffer time in to the system and the fact that it encourages Student Syndrome.

The visibility of the buffer time allows the whole project team to see the true situation and more importantly give a more realistic time line as the real buffer time needed when visible are clear is usually less than half that is found in most projects where the buffers are hidden.

It is the benefit of the visibility and the actual work left is that more projects are successful as they are easier to manage and know when the project is truly in exception which is before it would be noticed normally and at a point where it is easier to deal with.

The key changes in behavior are:

• Honest estimation of tasks
• No more multitasking
• Dedicated project time
• Sharing in ownership of the project and the buffer
• Removing uncertainty and Grey Areas.

Although this is only a brief outline on CCPM it has over time heavily influenced my thinking and also my adoption of GTD on a personnel level. By adoption only the basics of showing the buffer/task estimation along with adopting a single focus on the task (this requires a change in any organization to free up individuals) you should notice a difference very quickly. I will blog on CCPM more in the future focusing on individual elements.

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Related posts:

1. Critical Chain Project Management
2. Basics of Risk Management
3. Chain Theory
4. Essentials of Project Planning
5. Project Start Up – Feasibility Study – Outline