Book Reviews

Project Management in the Fast Lane

By Robert C. Newbold

Reviewed by Steve Buchwald, CIRM

I decided to read a book on project management because I have been involved in a lot of project management roles lately. I decided to read this particular book on project management because it deals with a new approach to project management. This new approach is called Critical Chain, which supposedly removes, among other assumptions, the implicit assumption of infinite capacity from the project management domain. If this sounds to you like a "Theory Of Constraints" thing then you are exactly right. The purpose of this book and of the concept of critical chain is to "Apply the Theory of Constraints" to the realm of project management.

The author presents his ideas in four sections; Project Management Today, Critical But Stable, Global Viewpoint, Global Leverage, and Implementation Issues. The purpose of these sections is to answer the old questions of what to change, to what to change, and how to change. The first section deals with the first question, "what to change?" Common problems and behavior patterns that exist in the current way of managing projects are examined. The author states that the reason for this is so "we can better understand the underlying causal relationships and core problems" [with the current system]. In the next section the author deals with solutions to the problems. He states that "we need to understand to what to change." He goes on to point out that one of the most common problems is uncertainty. Therefore he spends a great amount of time in this section describing how to deal with uncertainty in such a way that its effects aren't always impeding our efforts to improve. Section 3 deals with the importance of taking a global viewpoint. Remember that one of the big lessons of the theory of constraints is to not sacrifice the global good for a local optimization. The last section then presents some common implementation issues, problems and ideas. However, since a detailed implementation plan will be specific to an organization that applies it, a detailed implementation plan is not offered.

There is a good and bad side to this book. What I liked about this book was the author's candor. He stated early on that this approach might not be right for everyone. I also enjoyed his presentation. As you all know Dr. Goldratt can be quite full of himself and his approach can be less than effective at times. Nonetheless, this author presented Dr. Goldratt's ideas in a fresh and appealing manner. There is a lot to learn here and I recommend it to anyone who is involved in project management. There are good chapter summaries including key concepts and questions for further thought, which are discussed in appendix A. The only negative comment I have about this book is that I think the author sucks the audience in. What do I mean by this? Simple, that the project management discussions on how to apply critical path, while very good, are only about 1/2 of the written material in this book, the rest is dedicated to explaining the concept of the theory of constraints. Personally, I found those discussions unnecessary. However, you might have a different idea. Especially if your knowledge of the theory of constraints is a little weak. Therefore, why not pick up a copy of the book and read it.

I invite you to share your comments with me. You can contact me at casperb@earthlink.net. Until then let me say good reading.