Stories are one of the best ways to teach and Eliyahu Goldratt is a master story teller! In Critical Chain Goldratt weaves a tale to teach concepts to project managers on how to drive down schedule time, and reduce product cost using Theory of Constraints (TOC). It is an extension of the concepts taught in the Goal, but this time for project management rather than process management.

The problem management (at a factitious company) face in this book is their products have a short life span (6 months), but a long development time (2 years). Consequently they have to continually develop new products. To compound their problems, if they miss picking a good product, or launch an inferior product they could loose significant market share. Company loyalty just isn't what it used to be.

Fortunately, management realizes it is not a matter of "if" but "when" they will stumble. They assign a tiger team of young blood to drive down development time. This team has no idea where to start, and this book is the story of their journey of discovery.

The reader is taken on the journey with the team and learns about resources, bottlenecks, buffers, critical paths, constraints and more. By learning how to apply The Theory of Constraints the team (and the reader) is able to discover ways of reducing product development time significantly.

Overall, this is another excellent book by Eliyahu Goldratt. I learned a great deal from the Goal and Critical Chain. Goldratt is on a mission to change project management (and process management) from an art to a science. He does a great job at providing the tools and techniques for anyone willing to learn and apply these powerful concepts!

The Re-Discovery of Common Sense: A Guide to: The Lost Art of Critical Thinking

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement

This book is about applying TOC to project management. After reading this book I understood why TOC for project management is not as straight forward as it might first appear. Not only are projects not repeatable like production assembly lines buts in a multi-project environment you need to take shared resources into account. This is even more difficult when the managers for each project are different people. Lessons learned:

- Estimates should be "In X days with 50% chance of completion"
- Cut estimates in 2 or 3 if suspect that tasks have padding
- All the padding should go for the project but less than sum of padding
- Add time buffers (at no cost) when paths merge with critical path
- If a resource is shared between projects then it may be a bottleneck
- Resource bottlenecks should be treated as such: identify, exploit, subordinate, elevate...
- No due dates so as not to encourage the "student syndrome"

Of all the business novels by Eli Goldratt, I think that this is the one that I have learned the most from. As with all his novels, it's easy and fun to read with the added benefit that you will have learnt to better manage your projects. A must.

You're a project manager? This book is good.

You're not a project manager? You can learn from this, as being a single mom is being a project manager as well. It doesn't have the magic though if you can't transform knowledge to wisdom and that's where this book comes up short.

Although TOC is taken one step further, this book is on the edge of the four star rating. It does give manager some valuable insights which were missing in the previous books and is still fun to read and maybe it makes me long for not having read the previous books yet...

Like "The Goal," by the same author this book is excellent. If you don't think that you can learn about business from a novel, then you are wrong. I have probably learned more from this novel than most of the business books that I have read. This book will transform your business practices.

This book is well written; easy to read and to understand. It includes a bunch of useful concepts in a smooth way, so you assimilate the almost without effort.

Since it is written like a novel, rather than a textbook, I found myself reading it eagerly and I finished it in very few days. On the other hand, it is not suitable as a reference book.

In conclusion, if you want to introduce in project managing from a practical point of view just buy it, it really pays off