Guidelines proposed by Ed Walker (1) (continued):
7. The project manager must consider all activities and dependencies to be completed to achieve the project goals, as well as all conditions that must be met before an activity can begin when developing the project network.
8. Recognize the existence of finite capacity and activity duration variability by changing the planning, scheduling, and control of single and multiple projects to include a buffer time at the end of each individual project, as well as at points of convergence (technological convergence and convergence caused by resource contention) both within and across projects.
9. Recognize that the current practice of minimizing costs by delaying activity expenditures might be counter to the objective of on-time delivery of the projects.
10. Recognize that measuring resource managers by resource utilization creates inflated activity time estimates, timing issues in the use of resources, multitasking within and across projects, and ultimately project lateness.
11. Establish a clear and effective method for the planning and control of multiple projects looking at resource contention across projects. Recognize that not all projects can start as soon as possible. Projects should be pipelined based on the capacity of critical resources and staggered based on the capacity of those resources.
Dear reader, what do you think about the 11 guidelines? Do you agree or disagree with them? Do you think they are useful in order to improve (multiple) project management? Does Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) address all of the 11 guidelines? Please leave a comment. I’m looking forward to a lively discussion.
The best comment will be selected by me on Nov., 26th and announced the following day here on this page. The commentator will receive a free copy of my new book “Projects that Flow” as soon as it has been published.
In the book “Projects that Flow” I present a new holistic approach to (multiple) project management which features:
- Simple, constraint-oriented management
- Clear, robust priorities
- Company-wide, rather than locally focused optimization
- A focus on speed, on ProjectsFlow
It shows how you can:
- complete more projects with the same amount of resources,
- reliably deliver all projects to specs
- significantly shorten project lead times.
