mc2solutions was there in 1997 when Eli Goldratt integrated constraints management and project management in his popular book Critical Chain. We embraced his thinking and led the way to figuring out how to successfully implement it in product development organizations of all shapes and sizes. We’ve been experts in Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) for over a decade.

Typically in product development, projects are broken up into a series of milestones that are often managed at a departmental level. Consequently, project management in this paradigm revolves around measuring the performance of each department on meeting their milestones. This causes a conflict for such organizations. Do they provide a short milestone estimate for the good of the project? Or do they provide a longer, padded milestone estimate for the good of satisfying their measurement that may lengthen the project to an unacceptable duration? Furthermore, these milestone measurements almost certainly guarantee that no projects will finish early (since no one wants to admit that they padded their milestone estimates) and many finish late (or cut scope or exceed budget to finish on time).

Goldratt’s Critical Chain Method focuses on the project as a whole, not on intermediate milestones. It establishes for any project a series of buffers to protect against uncertainty in the project. The buffers provide focus and early warning in order to protect the due date of the project.

During project execution, the people doing the work in each project are regularly updating task status in such a way that the consumption of each buffer in the system can be measured. By measuring the percentage of each buffer consumed relative to the percentage of the work completed on the chain of work associated with that buffer, a manager is able to measure the status or health of a project at any given time. A survey of all the buffers provides a measure of the status or health of all the projects in the product development system.