In the middle of the project status meeting with my team, it strikes me there was something wrong. I realize one of the fundamental approaches to project management––the Critical Path method––has a serious weakness. You see, in our status meetings each team member provides an update on the task they are working on. I listen to each person, but I’m waiting to reach for my PC when they are ready to commit to the amount of progress they’ve made on the current task assignments. I enter the updates into our project management software. One of the outcomes is a revised critical chain. What’s wrong with that?
The Rut We Are In
We use the tasks along the new critical chain to help us focus on the things that will help us make the most progress. We do this every week. Almost always a new set of tasks appear. Almost always we have to revise our list of recover activities. And, I almost always have to tell resources stop work on one task (without finishing it) and start work on another task. This is called multi-tasking and we know how devastating it is. The Critical Chain method with it’s new, updated set of tasks is encouraging it!
We always seem to be behind. One of the outcomes of our status meeting is that each person usually has some kind of “recovery” activities to work on. These recover activities usually mean we have compromised on the exit criteria of a task. We try to avoid cutting corners, but that’s what it is. Everyone tries to look for the most efficient way of doing the work. As you can imagine, the most efficient way for one person may not be the best for someone else. I’ve had to intervene more than once before the frustrations boiled over into something worse.
Where Did Our Stability Go?
In there midst of the chaos that is our little corner of the Engineering group, we seek stability. If not for your team, but for ourselves. How is a new, weekly critical chain, and the switch in focus that comes with it, contributing to our stability? All the effort we made to recover is lost, or at least put aside, for a different set of tasks. The next week, we do that same thing––put tasks aside in favor of tasks which help us recover lost time. And, the next week? We do the same thing, over and over again. No wonder it doesn’t seem like we get anything done. Everyone seems busy, but week after week we are treading water and making little progress. All the while continuing to contribute to our team’s poor due date performance.
What About Resource Limitation?
But, determining the length of a project must also include the availability of resources. This is especially true when there are a shortage of key resource types or when there is a heavier than usual work load on the whole team. I know this when I find out that someone finished a task and is ready to hand their work off to someone else and the someone else is not available. Or, the someone else is so overloaded they can’t take on more work. Or, at the end of the quarter when almost everyone is overloaded, taking one more work would be like taking one more bite of desert after a large Thanksgiving meal.
Two Fatal Flaws
Yes, there is a fatal flaw in the Critical Path method. Actually, there are two of them. The first one is that after every update, the critical path changes undermining our much needed stability. And the second one is that we are not taking resource dependencies into account. This gives us a false impression of the length of the project and we miss opportunities to hand off completed work to the team member.
Summary & Next Steps
While the Critical Chain method has been around for a long time, I can’t be the only one that has recognized the shortcomings of this approach. Why would someone want to use a method which shifted your focus after after update? It hurts to know we wasted a lot of time switching from one set of tasks to another for so long. We could have used that time better and in ways that helped us improve our project performance. And, there has to be a way to take the limited resources we have into account.
So, it’s time I visit with my friend again and see if he have any suggestions. There has got to be a better way.