The TOCICO hosted an online Critical Chain 2020 conference this week. As it seems most online conferences are running, the talks themselves were pre-recorded and the speakers were available in chat during their talk, and this conference had live Q&A immediately following each speaker. This made for fewer talks overall, but good opportunity to learn a bit more from the presenters and other attendees. Examples in the conference ranged across multiple industries (aerospace, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, etc) and application areas (manufacturing, product development, information technology, etc.)
The talks that I attended described their work with Critical Chain Project Management, as one would expect. I was listening for unusual scenarios and situations where the implementations were more than “vanilla” critical chain. Of course, if you look for those examples, they tend to jump out - almost no implementation is “vanilla” in that there are always nuances and interesting elements.
In the kickoff, Ian Heptinstall, the conference host, reminded us that any good project has a good business case, good preparations, and good execution. And while critical chain basics are mostly about project execution, the elements of business case and preparations must be there otherwise, it is easy to get lost in infinite scope changes and re-prioritizations. I heard a number of people talk about bringing a disciplined approach to planning being a key element of their success - not that they had to build infinitely detailed plans, but that they had to work together to understand how all the pieces fit together. And it was in the working together to understand that the project came together. And having the clear scope and business value to start with was a big part of that.
As an example of the importance of preparation and how the CCPM approach helped, one presentation talked about using critical chain to help manage a manufacturing plant shutdown in six days instead of the original 2 months - most of the work being done in the planning phase by understanding the project and removing assumed constraints. It was only with a project model could they see and challenge the assumptions about how the work had to proceed. I also appreciated the importance of having the people who do the work participate in challenging the assumptions.
And then as you run projects, single projects or a full portfolio of projects, the concept of focus is critical. Where is that one thing that the team should focus on today to enable their project to move forward? Which project should receive real help from portfolio leadership - not in the form of more reports or updates, but true unsticking of blockages?
Given the online environment, conference organizers published several introductory videos about a month before the conference - what is Critical Chain and related topics. That’s a nice way to provide introductory material for attendees who might be new to the topic - and from the questions in the sessions chats and Q&A, it appeared there were a good number of people who appreciated that background.