Critical Chain Success Tip - Knowing when NOT to intervene is almost as important as knowing when TO intervene….

In project environments there are typically many tasks vying for priorities resulting in management firefighting. This is intensified by the common practice of managing tasks to completion dates making it difficult for managers to intervene early.  These delays in management assistance and focus hinder project completion.

How do we ensure management intervention in projects ensures they are completed on-time?

Firstly and most importantly we determine real task priorities. These should be determined by the impact the task has on completing the project on-time. In Critical Chain the amount of project buffer the tasks are consuming determines the task priority.

Task prioritisation is important for management to understand the tasks requiring their assistance and equally as importantly which tasks do not. Critical Chain task prioritisation helps management understand which tasks are the important few rather than the trivial many. With fewer tasks competing for management attention they are able to minimise queuing delays.
This allows management to quickly focus their attention on the tasks where their intervention has the biggest impact on the performance of the project.

Critical Chain Buffer Management must become the only priority system in use, removing any informal intuitive “he who shouts loudest” system from the organisation and aligning resource and management priorities to complete the project on time.