Controlling delays with Critical chain project management

This research provides an overview of the aspects of Critical Chain that make it successful, and then provides an introduction to Critical Chain and its application. Project Management involves making and keeping commitments under uncertainty, accompanied by complexity and interdependency. Traditional project management concepts have been around for over thirty years. If you look at the impetus for their development in the 1950s, you find that early studies noted that for USA Department of Defense projects, cost and time overruns were often two to three times the initial estimates and that project durations were frequently 40 to 50 percent greater than the original estimates. Similar studies of commercial projects noted cost and duration estimates overran by 70 and 40 percent respectively. Critical Path-based project management was introduced as a cure for these problems with a goal of delivering projects within the original cost and time estimates.In most project management environments, making binding commitments is expected in three separate dimensions: 1) schedule or time, 2) resource or budget, and 3) scope, quality, or performance objectives. Falling short of a commitment can result in the project being deemed a failure, with attendant negative consequences to stakeholders. The variability of the tasks in actuality can be planned for and handled via buffers placed in locations that protect the project as a whole. The buffers utilize the safety time removed from individual tasks. However, it has been found that using more aggressive task durations in conjunction with the buffers results in shorter overall project durations and better on-time performance and we have shown how using critical chain project management (CCPM), schedule delays can be controlled.

Keywords:

CCPM , CPM , Schedule , Project Management , Uncertainty , Buffer