pmStudent

“Just ask anybody in the organization what to change, and you will find out to what extent people are real experts at bitching and moaning…”

It wasn’t me, it was Goldratt who said it! Wow, I hope I don’t lose my G-rating on this website…. Read more »

A 10 minute video today on Critical Chain Project Management. A good introduction! Read more »

I wrote earlier about a potential method of using Critical Chain-stype “mini-buffers” within an element of a traditional project management approach. Now I would like to revisit multi-tasking and how having some experience with the Agile software development methodology called SCRUM has helped me formulate some guidelines. Some of these ideas come straight from Critical Chain too, and a myriad of other methodologies all pointing to the same conclusions. Read more »

Today I was trying to think of ways to integrate some of the methods and benefits of Critical Chain project management into the traditional PM methodology most companies use. I wanted to pick out one element of CC that would potentially yield the most benefit without much, if any, additional overhead to the project [...] Read more »

Hello everyone! I’m sorry it has been so long since my last post. I have been going through a job change, and the last month has been hectic with getting things shored up at my previous company and (trying) to get up to speed at the new company. I recently listened to [...] Read more »

Cornelius Fichtner over at The PM Podcast surprised me a while back by inviting me to be an interview guest on his show. I was obviously flattered as he puts out the grand daddy of project management podcasts, and I’ve been listening to the show for many moons. In my opinion Cornelius’ The [...] Read more »

I responded to a question on the PMI member forums that I wanted to share:
Subject: Critical Chain Project Management
Does anyone have experience with this PM approach/toolset. I have run across some people proclaiming it as the savior of project management (unfortunately, the biggest proponent I met seemed to think that a Project Plan is [...] Read more »

I corresponded with Vladimir Liberzon after seeing a post he made on the Critical Chain Yahoo Group with a link to a presentation on Resource Limited Project Management. The presentation deals with managing resource constraints from a Critical Chain perspective and is a good resource for people interested in CCPM. Vladimir’s company, Spider Management Technologies [...] Read more »

A Goldratt technique came in handy to map out where I see the conflict between CCPM and EVM that I referred to in my last post. Please excuse it’s sloppiness, I will try to make a cleaner computer-generated version later on, but I think I may be refining this later on anyway.
I’ve never [...] Read more »

It’s amazing how many wonderful people there are out there. I’ve reached out to several people who have all been so willing to mentor and help out a newbie like me. I’d like to give a shout out and thanks to the following, and keep the list updated so I always [...] Read more »

I had a discussion tonight with my great friend Chad that got my brain spinning again about Critical Chain and EVM. My notes are not available right now for me to reference, but I wanted to throw out some of the major concepts and challenges I’ve run into thus far.
First, the question is why [...] Read more »

Frank over at Focused Performance has a great site here on Critical Chain & Project Management. It contains, among other things, an example of the Goldratt “evaporating cloud” diagram for the objective of managing projects successfully. It highlights the conflict between having or not having safety time in task duration estimates within [...] Read more »

No Limits Leadership, Inc. has this white paper authored by Allan Elder titled “The Five Diseases of Project Management”. Allan was interviewed on Episode 57 of the Project Management Podcast a short time ago. This is an overview of some of the problems addressed by Critical Chain project management.
He identifies 5 reasons why [...] Read more »

I contacted Larry Leach of www.advanced-projects.com to ask his permission to post a great presentation he did at a NASA project management conference in 2005. He graciously gave his blessing. If you don’t know Larry’s work, he wrote a book with great reviews called Critical Chain Project Management. I haven’t read it [...] Read more »

Multi-tasking is a subject I’m passionate about. Passionate about NOT doing actually, whenever possible. Let me start by identifying two types of multi-tasking, bad and required.
Bad multi-tasking is working on two things simultaneously, or switching between things because something else is suddenly urgent, but not important enough to justify dropping everything you are [...] Read more »