A well attended webinar on the Critical Chain 2.0 method
On April 8th, the ECP Technical Department, in partnership with Eric Robin, Project Management Expert and specialist of the Critical Chain method, proposed a webinar which aroused a great interest from the participants.
While waiting for the next editions, discover the report signed by Eric Robin:
“Conventional project management has a lot of trouble meeting project deadlines, and the allocation of resources in a portfolio is a source of many conflicts and tensions.
Most companies are organised around a logic of time commitments for all tasks. In order to meet individual commitments, each actor adds safety margins. Unfortunately, these margins are wasted by several phenomena: procrastination, calendar syndrome, Parkinson’s law, multitasking. Thus, tasks are almost never finished ahead of schedule, the majority are on time and the others are behind schedule, which mechanically can only accumulate. The few strategic projects that finish on time with the initial scope often do so at the expense of all the others.
Furthermore, the Critical Path method calculates the duration of a project on the assumption of infinite capacity. However, resource constraints are increasingly frequent and the critical path no longer correctly represents the project’s time constraint.
Critical Chain therefore proposes to stop focusing on meeting deadlines for elementary tasks. It prefers to ask for the fastest possible execution and to value the relay principle. The safety margins linked to estimation uncertainties and hazards are mutualised in buffers.
On the other hand, the critical chain integrates resource constraints into the critical path and limits conflicts between projects by sequencing them around a few strategic resources and by dynamically arbitrating conflicts during execution according to the relative state of the buffers.
Companies that apply Critical Chain quickly achieve spectacular results:
– meeting deadlines in over 90% of cases
– reduction of the average project duration by 30-50
– increase in efficiency – the number of projects completed per year with constant resources – by more than 30%.
In the IT field, here is a recent quote from the Gartner Group:
“Anyone who works on projects and is concerned about deadlines should be interested in Critical Chain. Therefore, CIOs, PMO (Project Management Office) leaders, project portfolio managers, programme managers and project leaders are primarily concerned. “
Gartner, April 2016″
