Questions tagged [critical-chain]

From the Wikipedia Article on Critical Chain Project Management:

Critical chain project management (CCPM) is a method of planning and managing projects that puts the main emphasis on the resources required to execute project tasks. It was developed by Eliyahu M. Goldratt. This is in contrast to the more traditional critical path and PERT methods, which emphasize task order and rigid scheduling. A Critical Chain project network will tend to keep the resources levelly loaded, but will require them to be flexible in their start times and to quickly switch between tasks and task chains to keep the whole project on schedule.

Example Questions:

Some example questions with this tag include questions such as:

• Integrating Critical Chain into Scrum/Agile Practices

This question may need to be reviewed. It's an early question with a polling vibe:

• How do you deal with continuous work pressure?

Differences between CCPM and Critical Path Analysis:

The main features that distinguish the critical chain from the critical path are:

• The use of (often implicit) resource dependencies. Implicit means that they are not included in the project network but have to be identified by looking at the resource requirements.
• Lack of search for an optimum solution. This means that a "good enough" solution is enough because:
• As far as is known, there is no analytical method of finding an absolute optimum (i.e. having the overall shortest critical chain). The inherent uncertainty in estimates is much greater than the difference between the optimum and near-optimum ("good enough" solutions). The identification and insertion of buffers:
  • project buffer
  • feeding buffers
  • resource buffers. (Most of the time it is observed that companies are reluctant to give more resources)
  • Monitoring project progress and health by monitoring the consumption rate of the buffers rather than individual task performance to schedule.