CONCEPT
Critical Chain Project Management
Goldratt's application of TOC to project management — replacing the critical path with the <em>critical chain</em> and introducing buffers to protect projects against the systematic optimism of individual task estimates.
Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) is Goldratt's application of Theory of Constraints principles to project management, articulated in his 1997 novel Critical Chain. The method replaces traditional critical path analysis with the critical chain — the sequence of dependent tasks accounting for both task precedence and resource contention — and introduces three types of buffers (project buffer, feeding buffers, resource buffers) to protect the critical chain against the variability that makes most projects run late. CCPM explicitly rejects the practice of padding individual task estimates with safety margin, arguing that the padding is consumed by Parkinson's Law and student syndrome rather than protecting against genuine variability.
In The You On AI Field Guide
CCPM's central insight is that traditional project management treats each task as an independent unit to be estimated conservatively, with the result that project timelines are the sum of individually padded estimates — which, through Parkinson's Law (work expands to fill the time available), consume the padding and still finish late.
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