A tutorial on project management from a theory of constraints perspective

Managing projects is a difficult undertaking - a large number of projects fail to be completed on time, on budget, or to specifications. In traditional project management literature, researchers criticise project manager skills and leadership, user involvement, top management commitment, organisation, etc. More recently, research has identified underlying problems with project concepts. We briefly describe the types of failures (late delivery, over budget, less than full specs) of projects. Second, we examine some causes of project lateness. Third, we illustrate the calculations for project completion using traditional and critical chain project methodologies. We then conduct three small simulations of the network using uniform, triangular, and exponential distributions to determine the impact of using the critical chain methodology on project completion dates. Last, we provide some references discussing critical chain project management.