Efrat Goldratt-Ashlag has taken on the mantle of writing a business novel in the style of her father, Eli Goldratt. Goldratt’s Rules of Flow takes Eli Goldratt’s “Four Concepts of Flow” into project management environments and shows how some basic rules of flow can significantly reduce the chaos and improve results.
All tagged CCPM
The Agile Uprising podcast has been running a “TOC renaissance” - or “TOC-aissance” series, and I am the fourth entry on my favorite subject of Critical Chain Project Management. Have a listen.
The TOCICO hosted an online Critical Chain 2020 conference this week. As it seems most online conferences are running, the talks themselves were pre-recorded and the speakers were available in chat during their talk, and this conference had live Q&A immediately following each speaker. This made for fewer talks overall, but good opportunity to learn a bit more from the presenters and other attendees. Examples in the conference ranged across multiple industries (aerospace, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, etc) and application areas (manufacturing, product development, information technology, etc.)
Beyond the Goal is a great encapsulation of the TOC ideas and concepts. Eli Goldratt summarizes the previous 20 years (and more) of thinking and many of the topics in this audio book continued to be developed beyond this publication.
Sanjeev Gupta of Realization gave the opening keynote on the second day of TOCICO. The talk was billed as "The Rising Importance of TOC" but ended up becoming "Solving the Projects Problem: It's not about buffers or behaviors" based on his experience with years and years of CCPM software and implementations.
Unlocking Innovation Productivity
Unlocking Innovation Productivity (Proven Strategies that Have Transformed Organizations for Profitable and Predictable New Product Growth Worldwide) by Mike Dalton is a guide to the challenges of product innovation and how to overcome them. He provides seven cumulative strategies to improve innovation, all based on Critical Chain Project Management and the underlying Theory of Constraints.
Quality, Involvement, Flow: The Systemic Organization by Domenico Lepore, Angela Montgomery and Giovanni Siepe. It's a good read for people interested in management and creating ever-flourishing organizations.
Breakthrough Project Management from Ian Heptinstall and Robert Bolton is a brief guide to getting significantly improved project performance through combining two management approaches: One is Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) and the other is collaborative contracting. For me the material on CCPM is a confirmation of what I have been doing for many years. And the material on Project Alliancing is new, and yet it rings bells for ensuring successful projects of any type.
Mike Dalton has a nice series of articles on project management in Industry Week (and copied to LinkedIn Pulse). "Are Your Plans Realistic & Robust?" entry is on planning and using the CCPM approach to construct a plan.
Dee Jacob (author of Velocity) provided a workshop of a game she has been developing over many years of practice in critical chain project management. I have looked around for games or simulations to help highlight the critical pieces of critical chain, and this is the best I've seen.
Another talk on Strategy & Tactics Trees at the conference came from Michael Hannan. In this presentation he suggested updating the current "projects" S&T Tree to be more universal to any project-delivery organization.
Rob Newbold of ProChain (and author of a number of books on CCPM) has been thinking about updating the practice of CCPM around the planning and scheduling of CCPM projects. He presented four concepts that he's implemented, most of them seem reasonable. I don't know if they are all really needed though.
A quick anecdote from Realization's newsletter on "There is no such thing as good multitasking" and some thoughts around the idea.
The latest HBR Ideacast interview with Erin Reid talks about Why We Pretend to be Workaholics (based on a related HBR article). I enjoyed the discussion, but what really got to me is this idea of "pretending to be busy."
"The CIO's Guide to Breakthrough Project Portfolio Performance: Applying the Best of Critical Chain, Agile, and Lean" by Michael Hannan, Wolfram Muller, and Hilbert Robinson is a good, short description of how to take ideas from several disciplines and apply them to an overall portfolio management approach.
I attended a number of talks on CCPM today at TOCICO, as that is work I am doing these days. And these weren't even all the material that was available on CCPM. There were also some great hallway conversations.
Rob Newbold's latest book takes the reader further down into how to run projects (with CCPM). This book will be something to talk about with my colleagues and friends who are running these kinds of projects.
When planning a project, are you more interested in the dates every activity happens, or are you more interested in how all the activities are connected together?
Eli Goldratt’s Critical Chain is another of his business novels, published in 1997 - about 10 years after The Goal. I have read the book previously, but apparently it has been much longer than I realized. There were elements here that I didn’t remember at all - most of the story line in fact.
After the TOC ICO conference, I picked up Yuji Kishira's Wa - Transformation Management by Harmony, based on a conversation with him and other attendees. It is a fun take on Theory of Constraints, change management and other topics.