Overview

Projects fail at an alarming rate. Quantitative evaluations show that as many as 30% of projects are canceled before completion, wasting all the time, money, and effort spent on them. Surviving projects often fail to deliver the full initial project scope, or they deliver late and/or overrun the budget. Project delays and overruns frequently run to hundreds of percentage points. These failures consume billions of dollars per year. They occur in all cultures and for all kinds of projects. Attempts to improve project performance create personal and organizational pain and paperwork, with little positive, or even with negative, impact on project performance. The field of project management has not kept pace with improvements in other areas of human endeavor, such as technology and manufacturing. This book seeks to put you and your organization on a path to radically improve project success.

The first three chapters provide the background for Critical-Chain Project Management (CCPM), so if you are anxious to understand what it will do different for a single project, you can jump to Chapter 4. If you are even more anxious to start a single project, you can start with Chapter 6 on developing a single-project plan. Chapter 7 will guide you in planning multiple projects that share common resources.

This chapter provides the context for CCPM, starting by defining the problem and showing some data to assert that CCPM is proving to be an effective solution in a wide range of project types and industries. The main point...