Two major issues surrounding the management of multiple projects are resource planning and management of uncertainty. Traditional methods may be able to deal with the issue of resource planning, but provide no simple answer to the management of uncertainty in execution.
Critical Chain project management, with its buffer management method, gives the multi-project manager a high degree of visibility, focus and control over the specific tasks across a multitude of projects that require his or her attention.
In this paper you will gain an understanding of the meaning of: the Critical Chain, buffer management, the pacing resource, the Critical Ratio and how they all fit together to provide a simple, elegant and commonsense solution to managing complexity.
The Nature of Uncertainty and Complexity
It is a fact of life that in all of our endeavours, nothing is more certain than uncertainty itself. In the area of project management this might manifest itself in a variety of forms:
- Vendor performance is unreliable
- The effort required to complete tasks is not fully known
- The time to complete even well known tasks can vary
- The delivery of needed tools, material and equipment is uncertain
- The availability of the appropriately skilled people cannot be guaranteed.
Figure 1: The challenge of managing multiple projects, through functional resource management, is made more complex under the influence of uncertainty.
