Critical Chain by Eliyahu M. Goldratt

What it is about

Another book by Dr. Goldratt, not as well known as The Goal. This time he applies his Theory of Constraints to what other authors have called The Design Factory. While agile methodologies have succeeded in making organizations more reactive to markets and resilient to change, they rarely even acknowledge that tasks have dependencies between them and that they may be competing for scarce resources like UX design, DevOps or Database expertise. This book provides a blueprint to project management that easily scales from single team projects to multi-divisional or even multi-company or consortium size projects.

Why it changed my thinking

Adopting agile methodologies in the early 2000's left me with a struggle to incorporate and manage resources that don't naturally belong to the core agile team. Initially as a team or even multi-team leader, subject to priorities of the larger R&D organization, then as responsible for complete organizations myself. The tension between team independence and efficiency in the use of scarce resources is beautifully addressed in this book, which provides tools to even quantify risk, schedule and slack buffers for the project and the set of projects. Although I have not been able to fully implement his recommendations in any single project, just the insights gained by looking at projects through the lens that this book can give technology leaders the edge needed to outperform their own expectations.

Where to get it

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