Bringing Discipline to Project Management

By: Jeffrey Elton and Justin Roe

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Synopsis: How many projects in your organization have come in on time and on budget? If you're like most senior managers, the answer is likely to be none, no matter how many data-management systems, team-training programs, project-management software packages, or best practices you've been using. Are the project delays and cost overruns inescapable? One business thinker who says no is Eliyahu M. Goldratt. In his widely read novel The Goal, Goldratt pioneered the theory of constraints as a solution for factories struggling with production delays. Now, in Critical Chain, he extends the theory to the realm of project management. Whether a production process or a new-product-development project is at issue, the theory tells managers not to improve each step in the process but instead to focus on the bottlenecks, or constraints, that keep the process from increasing its output. Reviewers Jeffrey Elton and Justin Roe, consultants at Integral Inc., believe the theory works well for project managers dealing with individual projects. But they argue that senior managers need to take a broader perspective into account in order to manage a portfolio of all but the most innovative projects. And they question whether even properly focused managers can easily overcome the many balkanizing pressures that projects, in all their uncertainty, often fall prey to. To handle such pressures, companies also need talented leaders--a "constraint" that many will have difficulty overcoming.