Do we want every soldier to move faster or do we want the troop as a whole to move faster? In Race we produce at the pace of the downstream work team using CCPM.

CCPM stands for Critical Chain Project Management. CCPM is a method of planning and managing projects that emphasizes the resources (people, equipment, physical space) required to execute project tasks. It differs from more traditional methods that derive from critical path and PERT algorithms, which emphasize task order and rigid scheduling. A critical chain project network strives to keep resources leveled, and requires that they be flexible in start times.

Through our experience we have learned that projects are suffering from 3 mechanisms:

1. Student’s syndrome.
2. Multitasking.
3. Delays accumulate and advances do not. In sequential steps our deviations do not average out. Delays accumulate while advances do not.

Applying CCPM we track project’s budget using not dollars, but dollar*days. It is about multiplication and some of our clients have difficulties understanding the result of a multiplication of two different dimensions. But physicists know that one of the most important rules is the conservation of momentum. The summation of the masses of the parts in a system, each multiplying by its corresponding velocity, is conserved, no matter happens inside the system.

In Race we apply the Scrum framework together with the CCPM framework when we are developing the HOW and the WHEN.