Workshop Content:

The havoc and disruption of Covid19, has reinforced our need to effectively respond with new ways of conducting our businesses with updated services and products.  Our project management skills need to be sharpened.  Workshop participants are introduced to a fresh approach to effectively managing uncertainty and scarce resources within a dynamic multi-project environment.  This approach is an extrapolation from Constraint Innovation’s Buffer Management methodology (based on TOC) and is known by the term the “Critical Chain”.

 

An innovative and novel approach applied to the realm of safety buffers on a project's critical path. In contradiction to traditional thinking, Constraint Innovation not only claims that individual task safety buffers don't assist in meeting schedules, they, hinder the meeting of schedules on time.  The answer rests in the implementation of a Project Buffer rather than Task Buffers, which provides a cost-effective solution that focuses on the project's true critical path.

 

The learning goes on to focuses on Project Bottlenecks.  The methodology is based on the building blocks of Constraint Innovation that are distilled in a 5-step process:

• Identifying the constraint (i.e. the "Bottleneck")

• Exploiting the Constraint (i.e. not wasting the bottleneck to " get 100% use of the constraint)

• Subordinating to the Constraint (i.e. "Rearrange others to what you need to maintain 100% of the constraint")

• Elevating the Constraint (i.e. "Innovate to get greater than 100%)

• Identifying the new Constraint - continual improvement loop.

 

The learning material goes on to expand beyond the single project to address the more challenging area of a dynamic multi-project environment.   The powerful methodology is known as Drum – Buffer – Rope (DBR) is adapted to a multi-project environment.  The essence of DBR is to stagger the commencement of projects under the pace of the overriding system constraint together with practical procedures that mitigate the evils of bad multi-tasking.  

 

Workshop Format
Emphasis is placed on the active involvement of the participants with an emphasis on their working environment. Exercises are extensively used, and group learning through open discussions is encouraged.   Reliable case studies that have shown great success using CI’s methodology are elaborated on throughout the workshop.  The workshop is limited to 15 participants.

A prerequisite for the learning is that the participants have experience in Project Management and understand the fundamentals of the Theory of Constraints.

 

 

Learning Outcomes

• Meeting commitments: deliverables on time and within budget; meeting service levels within cost; Reducing downtime of key facilities and equipment.

• Enhance service levels, greater inventory turnover, and shorten lead times. Enhancing the ability to improve system performance without incurring additional costs.

• Improve quality by focusing our corrective and preventative actions on what counts most.

• A shift in thinking from localized efficiency towards system effectiveness.

• Focusing management efforts to where it counts most.

• Allocating resources to where it counts most.

• Enhance teamwork and job satisfaction

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