This Focused Performance Weblog is a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective. TOC is noted for its applications in Project Management and Multi-Project Management (Critical Chain) and Operations Management (Drum-Buffer-Rope), as well as in Marketing, Strategic Planning and Change Management (TOC Thinking Processes). If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
Wednesday, February 25, 2004
Promises and Prescriptions Part 8 - Combination Therapy -- Each of the individual prescriptions in this article is worth considering. Driving out pressures to multi-task, striving for clarity of dependencies between pieces of the project, and continuous refinement of that clarity throughout the life of the project are all common sense aspects of effective project management. Taken separately, they have the ability to provide improvement in project speed and reliability. Combined in a formal methodology, they can form a coherent therapy for troubled organizations, whose old habits and superstitions are at the root of their problems and sometimes conflict with these recommended practices.
One such methodology is the approach known as Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM). The basic premise of a Critical Chain schedule is that task due dates are avoided and uncertainty is managed separately from the rest of the schedule. The safety that used to be wasted protecting task promises from task uncertainty is now aggregated and concentrated where it counts. Some of the safety removed from tasks and iterations becomes a buffer protecting not task promises, but project promises. In addition to providing protection, the consumption and replenishment of this buffer as the project progresses provide feedback control used to monitor the health of promises and to manage accordingly.
Similarly, for multi-project systems, the pressure to multi-task in a CCPM environment is minimized through basic constraint (aka bottleneck) management concepts, which boils down to launching projects no faster than one or two heavily used, limiting resources can deal with them.
Much of what I've presented may sound like a basic, common sense (some might say uncommon sense) view of some of the problems faced in software projects. In the end, projects are all about dependent and interdependent efforts, uncertainty every step of the way, and the attention of resources to their component tasks in pursuit of a goal. If those are the things that are important, those are the things that deserve focused attention and common sense management.
(This is the final weblog-based installment of an article published in the January, 2004 issue of Better Software. Even if you don't get the magazine, I recommend you check out their StickyMinds site (free registration required for basic access). They feature a weekly column that often goes beyond the software development domain and is usually well worth a read.)
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