Quick Look at the PMBOK® Guide: Critical Chain Project Management

In this blog series, we’ll get you up to speed on using the key tools listed in A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, (PMBOK^® Guide) — Fifth Edition, including Critical Chain Project Management.

Critical Chain Project management is somewhat counterintuitive, so hang on to your hat. The outstanding feature of Critical Chain is that multitasking is not used anywhere in the process. It is been proven over a score of times that multitasking is the worst way to meet multiple corporate objectives, and yet it hangs on in corporations despite proof that it does not work.

The National Academy of Sciences did the definitive study on multitasking in 2011 and proved that multitasking temporarily reduced IQ by 10 points — in other words, multitasking makes you stupid.

Critical Chain focuses on the fact that you have scarce resources, so you want to make them count. As the picture below shows, you remove the contingency from each task or activity which reduces each activity by about 50%. Then you add a buffer to the end of the schedule that equals half of the new schedule and voilà! Your schedule is automatically reduced by 25%.

You can go to the Goldratt Institute to get training on Critical Chain Project Management, and I would recommend that you do so. Critical Chain requires some training and some practice in order to get good at but the results are nothing short of outstanding. Two companies in Chicago are using Critical Chain and have their project managers under non-disclose agreements because they are realizing a competitive advantage using Critical Chain as a project management methodology.

This is an excerpt from the Global Knowledge white paper, Are All Those Project Management Tools Really Needed?

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