Critical Chain
About this book
Goldratt's business novel applying the theory of constraints to project management. The story follows a business school lecturer and his students as they work out why projects overrun even when every individual task carries generous safety, and the answer turns on padding hidden inside estimates, student syndrome and multitasking across projects. The method that emerges strips safety from individual tasks and pools it into buffers placed on the critical chain, which is the longest path once resource contention is accounted for. It also covers running a portfolio of projects by staggering them against the constraining resource. This is the origin text for critical chain project management.
Description via Product Digest.
Topics
Related concepts
- Physical resource managementMaterial, equipment and facilities have lead times, storage costs and delivery windows that effort does not, and planning them as though they behaved like people is a reliable way to stall a project.
- Schedule managementBuilding a model of how work unfolds in time from activities, dependencies and durations, then reading the critical path, the float and the price of every compression it offers.