Need for Speed

By Janis Rizzuto,
Projects@work

As more organizations achieve bottom-line benefits from Critical Chain, the execution management approach is moving from high concept to best practice, and adoption is on the rise. But even proponents acknowledge that its hard focus on faster results is not for every project environment. Here’s a closer look at where and why critical chain is working.

The key to good project execution is not detailed planning and control, but coordinating execution priorities across the organization. That’s the core concept of critical chain, and it may feel antithetical to some project managers.

Nevertheless, it has been about 20 years since Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt introduced critical chain and about 13 years since businesses began to embrace critical chain-based execution management. So given that the concepts are relatively new compared with longstanding project management approaches, where does the project management community stand today in terms of adoption and acceptance? It turns out that as critical chain’s big-win stories are tallied, more organizations are moving into the camp and a broader swath of industries are trying out the approach that promises faster and cheaper project results by up to 50 percent.

Just ask the leadership at the Corpus Christi Army Depot, who led an implementation of critical chain at the depot with strong benefits.

CCAD is the largest tenant organization on Naval Air Station Corpus Christi with more than 158 acres and 2.2 million square feet of industrial space, according to Ed Mickley, public affairs officer. With a workforce of more than 5,500 and annual revenue of more than $1 billion, CCAD is a major economic force in south Texas and the Department of Defense’s primary facility for rotary wing repair — a demanding role based on the steady rate of incoming crash-damaged aircraft.

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