Page 109 - The Handbook for Quality Management a Complete Guide to Operational Excellence

96 I n t e g r a t e d P l a n n i n g S t r a t e g i c P l a n n i n g 97

4. Multitasking—the tendency of management to assign people more
than one deadline activity simultaneously. Multitasking can create
a devastating effect. Project personnel switch back and forth
between sev eral tasks, causing “drag” in all of them. The result is
that other resources that depend on these task completions for their
inputs are delayed. Delays “cascade” when several simultaneous
projects are involved.

The delays that result from this kind of behavior are caused by a
flawed management assumption: The only way to ensure on-time completion
of a pro ject is to ensure that EVERY activity will finish on time. This common
manage ment belief prompts management to attribute unwarranted
importance to meeting scheduled completion time for each separate
activity in a project. People then pad their estimates of task times to
ensure they can get everything done in time. But at the same time, they
try to not finish much earlier than their own inflated estimation, so as
not to be held to shorter task times on subsequent projects. All of these
“human machinations” cause a vicious circle, dragging projects out
longer and longer, but the reliability of meeting the orig inal schedules
isn’t improved.
Second, to solve this problem, Critical Chain takes most of the protec-
tive time out of each individual activity and positions some of it at key
points in the project activity network: at convergence points and just
ahead of project delivery. Since accumulating protection on an entire chain
is much more effective than protecting every activity, only half of the
aggregated “protective pad” extracted from individual activities is put
back in at the key locations. The rest can contribute to earlier project com-
pletion. In traditional project execution, if protective time in a specific
activity isn’t used, it’s lost forever—unusable by later activities that might
need more protection than they were originally assigned. This formerly
“lost time” is, in many cases, usable in Critical Chain.
Third, Critical Chain devotes more attention to the availability of criti-
cal resources when they’re needed for specific activities. Leveling the
resources on any single project is mandatory. The Critical Chain is really
the longest sequence in the project that considers both dependent, sequen-
tial activity links and resource links. The critical path reflects only the
sequential linking of dependent tasks.
The key elements of Critical Chain Project Management include:

• The Critical Chain. The set of tasks that determines project duration,
considering both task precedence and resource dependencies
(Newbold, 1998). The longest sequence of dependent activities is
the “critical path” in a PERT/CPM approach. But when the duration
of this sequence is adjusted for optimum resource availability
(resource leveling), the whole definition of the critical path becomes

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