Robert Barnes Consulting

Project Management

You can't work in Information Technology without being involved in projects - whether a large project such as installing an ERP system, or a small project to develop a few new reports and enquiries from an existing database.  Led by the Project Management Institute, Project Management is starting to be recognised as a distinct profession and a specific professional skill. Like many others I have completed certification as a "Project Management Professional" (PMP), and have held this qualification for about 10 years.  As an "IT Consultant", most of the significant assignments that I have had have been as a Project Manager, and I'm proud of the fact that I have let several projects that have been very successful, usually with paybacks measured in one or two months.  I was told that my first project for Fletcher Building was "the most successful IT project in the last 10 years".  

In about 2000 I became interested in "Critical Chain Project Management, following the publication of a book by Eliayahu Goldratt, author of "The Goal" and originator of the "Theory of Constraints".   "Critical Chain" promised to achieve for project management what "The Goal' had achieved for Process Management, and seemed to offer answers to problems that have always frustrated project managers.  After researching CCPM, I prepared and presented a brief (1/2 day) workshop on it.  

I have now applied CCPM principles in a number of projects.  I believe that there are some valuable ideas in CCPM, but that on its own it is simplistic and overhyped.   Tzvi Raz (a professor at Tel Aviv University) and I wrote a paper, which we presented at the Europe 2001 PMI conference, which attempted to put CCPM into context.  A longer version of the paper was published in a refereed journal.

I now incorporate CCPM as just part of normal project management:  it is a brilliant (and so easy) tool to manage the conflict between the competing goals of "being on time" and "maximum speed/minimum cost", and when used well changes positively the dynamics of project manager/project worker interactions.  My regular course, "Essential Skills of Project Management" coverering all aspects of Project Management includes the principles of CCPM within its Time Management section. 

Here are a number of presentations that I've given on CCPM and Project Management generally.  If you have a slow Internet connection, then some of these presentations may take a little time to download.

I have also provided links to other material on Project Management in General, and CCPM in particular, which may prove useful.

Please contact me if you'd like me to present any of these workshops, or to undertake a project management assignment.

Interesting Links and Resources

Gantthead.com.  This site provides a wealth of resources for the project manager, much for free, such as project templates for a variety of different project types, and advice and white papers on various project-related and IT-related subjects. 

On the merits and Pitfalls of Critical Chain scheduling, by Willy Herroelen & Roel Leus. Journal of Operations Management 19(2001), pp 559-577

Absract:  The direct application of the Theory of Constraints (TOC) to project management, known as Critical Chain Scheduling and Buffer Management (CC/BM), has recently emerged as one of the most popular approaches to project management. It is the objective of this paper to highlight the merits and pitfalls of the CC/BM scheduling approach. Following a short overview of the fundamentals of CC/BM, the strengths and weaknesses of the approach are put into perspective, based on a critical analysis of the literature as well as our own experimentation with commercial CC/BM software. The CC/BM scheduling mechanism is tested in a full factorial experiment performed on a set of benchmark problems. It appears that the 50% rule for buffer sizing may lead to a serious overestimation of the required buffer protection. Regularly updating the baseline schedule and the critical chain provides the best intermediate estimates of the final project duration and yields the smallest final project duration. Using clever project scheduling and rescheduling mechanisms such as branch-and-bound, has a beneficiary effect on the final makespan. © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

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