They could not develop the market fast enough. They could not get the new technology out soon enough. They were unable to grow the revenues as quickly as they had expanded the company and counter the resulting growth in expenses.

To help deliver projects faster and more reliably.

It is a great set of general problem-solving tools that can be used to look at an organization as a whole, identify areas to focus on, and drive overall improvements.

It can be used help focus teams on any improvement effort from Critical Chain, Scrum, Agile, new technology deployments, and so on.

Your projects miss critical deadlines and market opportunities.

You cut too many key features to make deadlines.

Your products are not competitive enough (due to slow project turnaround, missing deadlines, cutting key features, etc.).

There is too much resource burn-out and turnover.

You go over budget (due to project overruns).

There are internal projects fights over shared resources.

Help to better manage the variability in all projects.

There is more work involved than originally expected, additional scope and requirements are added, resources are not available, tasks take longer than expected, and project disasters happen that might sink a project.

It provides clear priorities, focuses resources on key projects versus spreading them out, and encourages quick hand-offs.

No, if you are working on one task and get blocked, working on a second task is fine. If you are juggling multiple tasks and going back and forth between them is slowing you down, then it is bad.

A better way to call out true dependencies that can also be creatively challenged.

It provides a way to do a root cause analysis of your organizations issues. From there, you can see which issues the Critical Chain general solution can help you address. But as important, you can also see what other areas you will need to work on. This enables you to develop a complete and overall solution that will significantly improve your organization.

How well the culture supports and adopts the solution

How well the process addresses the organization’s problems

You can certainly mix project-management methodologies, but you need to have a solid grounding in the methodologies you are trying to mix. It is really important to first focus on getting your Critical Chain experience then you can look at adding other methods into it.

Tim’s chart helps visually map out several of the key components and connections between them for both the current situation as well as the desired situation.

Tim’s charts can be shared with some key people, but in general they are often too detailed and technical to share with everyone. In these cases you may want to leverage the information from the flowcharts for discussions but not share them directly.

The methodology did not seem to work well when they had tried to implement it on their own.

No one was certified in Critical Chain and had no one had prior experience implementing Critical Chain.

A Critical Chain implementation expert who really understands the mechanics of the Critical Chain solution, how to use it correctly to help organizations increase throughput, and how to successfully implement it in an organization.

Someone who has Critical Chain software tool experience.

For complicated and political environments, I personally like to see someone who has a Theory of Constraints Thinking Process background who can do an organizational analysis.

The organization has a compelling need and desire to change.

Setting up the correct metrics.

Does the organization’s project team take ownership of the Critical Chain solution?

Is senior management brought into the solution?

How complex is your project environment?

Existence of poor project-management practices.

Project and feeding buffers to better manage variability

Reducing bad multi-tasking to find hidden or misused resource capacity

Building schedules back-to-front and challenging assumptions

Organizational Analysis (TOC Thinking Process) to better understand the environment

Padding dates is the practice of adding additional time on top of an engineering deadline. It can be problematic since it can extend the overall project’s length and if it is too long this time can get cut by management.

How much time engineers can get management to add to the schedule to ensure features and quality versus how much time managers can cut from the engineers’ estimates to manage costs and hit key market windows.

It provides strategic use of safety time to more effectively protect the overall project’s deadline. In doing this, it can help shorten the overall project duration versus padding that just adds additional time.

The project buffer consumption can also be used to trigger planning and response plans if the project starts encountering too many delays.

Roadrunner refers to the fact that you want resources to start working on a task as soon as it is assigned to them. Relay race is that as soon as a task is finished you want them to hand off to the next resource so they can start right away. Bad multi-tasking is when resources work on several tasks at once. Student syndrome is the temptation to put work off to the last minute.

To minimize overall project delays from feeding task issues and delays.

The extra time (padding) engineers add to a task to protect against delays and paranoia.

Critical Chain sets up ways to manage the variability of a project so companies are less impacted by delays. The feeding buffers minimize delays from feeding paths. Moving safety time out of the tasks and into a project buffer allows you to better protect the project’s deadline from delays without adding time. The project behaviors are to help you move as quickly forward in executing the project as you can.

Bad multi-tasking causes deadlines to get stretched out, resource capacity to be wasted, and your responsiveness to be wasted.

The first step is to be sure that you have a clearly defined project goal.

It allows you to make sure you have captured all of the necessary tasks and dependencies.

Make sure that you have captured all of the key requirements in the schedule.

It allows you to make sure you capture key dependencies and tasks that might be overlooked by just listing requirements, it helps you make sure you clearly define the project goal, and it helps you make sure the key tasks you are doing are sufficient to reach that goal.

Critical Chain helps address the common project-management issues. The organizational analysis helps you identify organizational issues that could significantly limit the results of your Critical Chain implementation as well as helps you see what needs to help improve the organization as a whole.

The organizational analysis helps in getting the organizational buy-in on what problems need to be addressed, how, and why Critical Chain and some other key improvements are necessary.

In order to expand, LivingTV needed to decide if it wanted to first expand into a nationwide service or expand the number of programs and games it offered.

LivingTV was stuck because it only had the funding to either go nationwide or expand programming; it could not do both.

Everyone wanted LivingTV to grow and be successful.

One side wanted LivingTV to go nationwide.

One side wanted LivingTV to expand its programming.

One side needed to have a market large enough to attract advertising revenue.

One side needed to have enough programming to develop subscriber revenue.

DD’ to challenge the assumptions behind the conflict itself.

BD and CD’ to challenge the assumptions between each side’s need and each side’s want.

CD’

There was no way to get additional programming without paying additional royalties.

The “go deep” subscriber/programming side benefited since there were now able to increase the number of programs supported without significant expense by not having to pay royalties to get pre-distribution access to shows.

The side that wanted to “go broad” benefited since they will now have the money and resources to expand.

With the pre-show, both sides were able to protect and move forward with their needs.

His idea failing by getting stalled by the company’s approval process. In addition, Tim could educate each decision maker about the idea as well as have a chance to address their concerns in advance.

John liked how it supported his goals to expand the number of shows LivingTV supported, the idea’s ability to support any show, and the concept gave his team a full week to develop each week’s script.

Mike liked that the idea was not technically challenging to implement.

Jim liked that it gave the opportunity to produce any and as many shows as LivingTV wanted without the high cost of royalties.

Everyone had concerns around the legality of the developing LivingTV content based on TV shows that have been broadcast.

Mike wanted Tim to review the idea with Peter in case there were additional technical concerns.

Jim had concerns around legal and maintaining the company’s relationship with broadcasters.

John focused on programming operations questions, Mike on engineering and technical questions, and Jim on executive and strategic relationship questions.

Everyone needs a general idea of the solution, but each person’s interest and questions often focus on where they are in the organization (i.e., John in operations, Mike in technical, and Jim in strategic).

At the start of the meeting, everyone already understood the concept and Tim and Lori had been able to understand and help address the majority of concerns. This streamlined the meeting.

The team should have regular, typically weekly, schedule updates.

The fever chart measures how much buffer you have consumed compared to how much of the project you have completed.

Green means you are on track, yellow means you are falling behind and need to look at ways to recover, and red means that you are putting the project deadline at risk and need to act to add time back into the buffer.

To recover time, review BORA: B reak a link, O verlap tasks, R educe scope or duration, or A dd a resource.

Roadrunner: You encourage people to work as quickly as they can.

Relay race: You encourage people to hand off work to the next resource (dependency) as quickly as possible.

Reduce bad multi-tasking: You want to avoid any multi-tasking that stretches out work and delays hand-offs.

Do not beat up resources for missing focused times; they are aggressive by design so you should expect that several will be missed. You’ll want to manage the overall project buffer and overall deadline, not micro-manage resources.

The engineering schedule ran late and the overall project deadline held so the QA timeframe was severely compressed with the expectation that the team would hold to the original quality and testing guidelines.

It’s clear, measurable, and has specific criteria and dates.

Software is often late, software’s delays reduces the time left for QA, software going into test is of poor quality, QA is blamed for software’s low quality, and software engineers change requirements without informing QA.

The person who first raised the issue should have the first opportunity to make a suggestion. Afterward, others can add their own suggestions as it makes sense.

Flying pig suggestions are “way out there” suggestions that initially seem impossible, such as we can breathe under water, we can land on the moon, we all become rich, etc. They are useful in that they give you a direction as long as you can eventually come back and convert the flying pig idea back into something realistic and implementable.

Tim is doing a quick check to make sure that there were not any other major issues that would prevent the team from reaching the goal that had not been discussed.

Sequencing, owner, timeline.

Focus on putting together an overall plan that includes not only the traditional tasks needed to complete a schedule, but also a plan that captures the issues you are concerned about and your plans on how to overcome these concerns.

Develop a goal

Identify issues

Develop suggestions

Sequence the suggestions

Missed dates and features have caused the company to incur penalties, get less desirable contract terms, and lose future contracts.

The company is missing revenue targets.

Several of the execs have lost trust in engineering’s ability to deliver.

Micky has once looked into adding additional product lines [crt 30].

Competitors are catching up and getting contracts the company once had.

The company has lost several good people due to tight deadlines, priorities switching, and unrealistic schedules.

Competitors are ramping up and picking up some of the people who left and that in turn has lead to poaching of additional employees.

Micky had asked the execs to look at a potential 10% resource cut across the company, but is unlikely to follow through on it since it would have long-term consequences.

To help get buy-in in an effective and systematic way, help address people’s concerns, and help them understand and ideally agree to your proposal.

Layer 1: Lack of consensus on the problem.

Layer 2: People do not agree on the direction of the solution.

Layer 3: Arguing the proposed solution cannot yield the desired outcome.

Layer 4: Yes, but. Concerns about potential negative side-effects from proposed solution.

Layer 5: Obstacles that stand in the way of implementing solution into the environment.

Layer 6: Raising doubts, wait and see, unverbalized fears.

Layer 1: Lack of consensus on the problem. CRT tool.

Layer 2: People do not agree on the direction of the solution. Cloud and Injection tool.

Layer 3: Arguing the proposed solution cannot yield the desired outcome. FRT tool.

Layer 4: Yes, but. Concerns about potential side-effects from proposed solution. Negative Branch (NBR) tool.

When you start showing CRTs and FRTs and start using TOC lingo on people who are not familiar with TOC, instead of them being amazed by your insights, they in fact will be turned off by the complexity and your arrogance in assuming they would understand something so new and different instantly.

You want to focus attention on the system, not go around finger pointing and blaming people.

It is not that any one person or group is trying to undermine the company. The system, the way you operate, is holding you back. The CRT outlines this system and how it is interconnected. Companies need to focus their efforts on understanding, blaming, and changing the system.

It could work briefly. But in the long run it would likely fall apart. As noted in the factors for success [Chapter 3 ], the organizational buy-in is needed. If management is not brought in and understand the project buffers they will just cut them and that will undermine Critical Chain’s success. With the cut project buffers, you are more likely to miss deadlines and in turn management will push even more to switch to some other methodology du jour. The same is true with the buffer management and project behaviors. Without management support, they will not work and in turn the Critical Chain solution will not work.

You are holding a meeting for a reason. If you present everything, but do not close it with a confirmed call to action, then people are informed but nothing changes. You need the call to action to get ensure that you get some level of commitment and cause change.

Quantify the issues (Layer 1)

Explain the core conflict and key injection (Layer 2)

Walk through the vision/FRT (Layer 3)

Close the deal

Throughput

Project buffers and behaviors

Organizational analysis

Summarize the vision

About 40% of the projects have some delays.

He and Gary have to juggle project priorities between proprietary features and infrastructure versus general features and infrastructure.

Micky states the revenues from contracts are down 30%.

Tim is catering to the audience. Grant lives a lot of the engineering issues, so it made sense to start the discussion there. Micky is the CEO and sees and lives the company’s struggles so starting with the cloud of the company’s conflict should work well for him.

Show the cloud

Blame the system and highlight key issues from the CRT

Introduce the key injection and vision

They hit a number of issues and consumed some of the project buffer, but are still on track to hit their deliverables.

The development team feels more confident that the schedule is realistic and they actually have a chance to succeed.

Randal has been working with Gary to talk with the customers to better enable a clean feature check-out. The customers appreciate the attention and Gary feels it will help them get payments a month early if the schedules continue to hold up.