Critical Chain: A Business Novel - by Eliyahu M. Goldratt

Date read: 2020-11-15
How strongly I recommend it: 6/10
(See my list of 150+ books, for more.)

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Told in the format of a business novel, similar to Patrick Lencioni's books, it provides a different solution to project management by focusing on the critical chain of tasks in a project vs. trying to micro-manage every task. Recommended for senior executives and project leaders who are running in to consistent issues with late projects.

My Notes

For more information on the Theory of Constraints go to: www.goldratt.com

Companies are so immersed in the mentality of saving money that they forget that the whole intention of a project is not to save money but to make money.

"The critical path," I remind the class, "determines the time it will take to finish the project. Any delay on the critical path will delay the completion of the project. That's why the project manager must focus on it."

In order to manage well, managers must control cost, and at the same time, managers must protect throughput—they must ensure that the right products will reach the right clients in a way that they will pay for them.

A delay in one step is passed, in full, to the next step. An advance made in one step is usually wasted.

In sequential steps our deviations do not average out. Delays accumulate, while advances do not. This can explain how so much of our safety disappears.

"Multi-tasking is probably the biggest killer of lead time," I say. "And we all suffer from it. Call it meetings, call it emergencies, call it other jobs. The impact is the same. Lead time inflates. If you think about it, whenever you give a time estimate you know that the actual time is just a fraction of your estimate, but you intuitively factor in the impact of multi-tasking."

"We found three mechanisms to put safety in. Now it seems that we also found three mechanisms to waste that safety. One we called the student syndrome, there is no rush so start at the last minute. The second is multi-tasking. The third involves the dependencies between steps; these dependencies cause delays to accumulate and advances to be wasted.

The ‘feeding buffer' protects the critical path from delays occurring in the corresponding noncritical paths. But when the problem causes a delay bigger than the feeding buffer, the project completion date is still protected by the ‘project buffer.'

Ways to Improve Projects:

1. Persuading the various resources to cut their lead time estimates.
2. Eliminating milestones or, in other words, eliminating completion due dates for individual steps.
3. Frequent reporting of expected completion times.