Issue: September 11, 2007

Dear Managers,

Every other week we bring you one tip from our most successful implementations. This issue of Execution Management Minute is about a key rule for estimating and managing tasks. If you find it useful, please feel free to forward it to your colleagues.

The Realization Team

 

Task Estimates, Buffers and Task Management

One of the key differences between Critical Chain and the traditional ways of managing execution is the treatment of task estimates.

Traditional ways expect task estimates to be precise and that people will meet those estimates during execution. Critical Chain recognizes that due to the uncertain nature of project work, if every task is expected to be on time, people will build safeties into their estimates. However, these safeties eventually get wasted during execution because of Student Syndrome and Parkinson's Law. The net effect is that project plans are longer than they need to be, yet projects still do not finish on time. Therefore, a better way is to:

  1. Make it unacceptable for managers to measure people against task estimates.
  2. Make project, feeding and contractual milestone buffers mandatory in projects. These buffers should be at minimum 50% of cumulative task durations.
  3. Expect the following behaviors from Task Managers in execution:
    • Assign people to work on one task at a time, in the order of Concerto priorities
    • Prepare for upcoming tasks, so that they can be started and completed without interruptions
    • If an issue comes up in executing a task, resolve it immediately

By implementing the above, you will see a big improvement in the speed of execution. And that's the Execution Management Minute for this week.