Critical Chain: Have you used this method in your projects?

A few thoughts for the group based on reading the above comments and ten years of using Critical Chain concepts in a lot of different kinds of projects.

My Experience has been that if you use the three rules of Critical Chain.
1. Task Buffering: Don’t turn estimates into commitments. Shorten project plans and include buffers.
2. Pipelining: Stagger project starts around resource availability.
3. Buffer Management: Follow task priorities, don’t waste buffers. But consuming all of the buffer is OK.

You can deliver projects on time or early with the planned scope and within budget more often than using traditional project management.

Things you cannot change include
1.Human nature; this is why you buffer tasks and use buffer management as your control mechanism.
2. The unknown problems and interruptions you will encounter. This is what the feeding and project buffers are for.

Things you can change include
1. Having people focus on fewer things (this is especially important for the highest priority tasks) VS doing several things at once and delaying all of the completions.
2. Removing the Parkinsons Law from the tasks. This is actually one of the benefits of doing task buffering, AKA using the mean time of the task estimate.

I teach that there are three parts to every task, The work, the interruptions and the Parkinsons law. You have to do some work or it shouldn't be a task, you never know how much interruptions and delays you will have, but the one thing you can do up front in planning is you can reduce the Parkinsons law at the very beginning through using the three rules

The normal management mechanisms for managing issues that arise don't change, it will still take a management decision on what is most important, where to apply additional resources, when overtime is required, what tasks can be started sooner etc...
Because there is no magic solution to getting work completed, it still is work.

But Critical Chain tools and techniques can provide management with the visibility and predictability they require to reduce stress and accomplish the mission.

Hope this helps someone.

Good input there, James M. Especially agree with having people focus on fewer things! Very common for the most critical resources to be the ones pulled off, interrupted, etc. Must protect your key resources to the extent possible. (But that's not always possible I realize.)

Critical Chain is nothing new for people who were trained in operation research which is the basement for TOC. I have the opportunity to use Critical Chain and I have the opportunity to be trained for Mr. Goldratt. And I am involved on implementing Critical Chain. The best advise I can give to people who like to use it is: Critical Chain demands a cultural change in all stakeholders mainly in project manager. Read and understand Critical Chain and you will understand why the cultural change.

I have read Mr. Goldratt''s seminal work. What he makes explicit in the critical chain methodology is what most experienced project managers know: those who estimate lie.

Most people who are asked to provide estimate are usually not accountable for the accuracy of their estimate. (I worked with one company who actually gave a superior performance rating to those people whose estimates were alwways withing /- 10%).
As long as individual contributors are assessed for being under budget and on schedule, these conservative estimates will continue.

As a critical chain project manager, you understand that this is part of the game. You then expose the play by cutting the estimate back by 50%, ay, and allocating the cut amount to the buffer.

Of course, you also need to make sure the resource is dedicated to the task. (Part of the lie is because people get pulled in multiple directions.).

Hold your estimators accountable but make sure they are fully allocated to their activities.

Wow, Sergio Luis Conte!
That must have indeed been an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, being trained in TOC by the grat man himself!
I completely agree that achieving success in applying Critical Chain requires a pradigm shift in the way Project Managers think about Project Management.

Cultural change is really the greatest challenge a PM is to face when adopting Critical Chain approach. Not only to get the overestimated cuts, dimensioning buffers and making them understood to customers and teams but to get work package owners to report correctly remaining work durations and to get rid of the planned start dates to really start work as predecessors are concluded.

Am still trying to see how using this technique will improve the process. Take an estimate of 8d to complete an activity or 18mo to complete a project. Half goes to the buffer. Come day 4 or month 9 and if the estimate was within a definitive range to start, it will still consumes the buffer. At the end, the actual was 8d or 18mo /- the definitive range of the estimate.