Critical Chain Project Management / Lean Project Management Workshop

If your company is like many, you continue to experience failure to deliver projects to schedule, budget, and scope, and may experience cancelled projects at an alarming rate. Although this problem seems to be publicized most in the IT industry, it affects all project from basic R&D to construction, in all industries. Lean Project Management (LPM), embodying Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM), enables you to deliver project success in ‘half the time, all the time’. CCPM users also report increased quality of work life for project team members. Lean thinking adds other ways to reduce waste during project delivery. This highly interactive workshop provides participants with the understanding and skills to immediately apply CCPM.

What’s Happening

The demands to do more with less, and do it quicker, continue to characterize all project environments today. Many companies have moved to management by project, and proceeded to train people in the ways of the the Project Management Institute Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK®), or industry specific approaches such as  Software Engineering Institute Capability Maturity Model (CMM) or the Construction Industry Institute (CII). Many  managers become lost in the complexity of these heavy methods, and are looking for relief. The new CCPM method focuses your efforts and project teams to create repeatable project success, and accelerate project completion; usually by at least one half the previous time. CCPM builds on the important parts of the CMM and PMBOK, but makes them work for you.

Who Should Attend

Project Managers who are responsible for establishing or managing projects of any size or complexity; but especially those with high-risk projects.

Program Managers, accountable for the scheduling and success of multiple projects.

Functional Managers, responsible for assigning resources to multiple projects with conflicting demands.

Senior Managers who want to achieve a step change in organizational performance.

What You Will Learn

• Develop project schedules that you and your team can succeed at.
• Reduce the chaos and crisis that often exists in project organizations.
• Simplify your project schedules.
• Improve the ability of your project teams to focus on what is important.
• Deliver your projects on or ahead of schedule.
• Routinely deliver the full project scope.
• Deliver projects at or below the budget.
• If you develop new products, improve your company’s market penetration and growth.
• If you perform projects on fixed price contracts, increase your profitability.
• Reduce the payback period for investment projects.
• Eliminate the win-lose approach to project task estimating and performance.
• Provide management with instant clear reports on, “When are you going to finish?”
• Eliminate project status reporting delay.
• Eliminate confusing or misleading earned value reports.
• Simplify project status determination and reporting.
• Enable all project team members to know instantly which project task they should work on.
• Reduce pressure and stress on project team members.
• Reduce project changes.
• Overcome resource shortages, without hiring additional resources.
• Deliver your projects in one-half the previous time, or less.

Benefits to Your Company

• 300% or more improvement in Benefit/Cost for projects.
• Increased customer satisfaction.
• Project success rates (scope, cost, schedule) improve from low tens of percents to 100%.
• Project delivery times cut by one half or more.
• Reduced backlog of projects.
• More projects complete per year than before.
• More successful projects with no increase in resources.
• Improved satisfaction and motivation of project team members.

Benefits of Attending

• You will learn how to increase your personal productivity
• Your projects will complete on time, all the time…usually in much less time than previous similar projects.
• You will be able to simplify complex business problems and quickly focus on what maters most.
• You will improve the motivation and satisfaction of your project team members.
• You will have a new process to develop effective project schedules.

What Makes This Seminar Unique

This seminar is taught by Larry Leach, author of Critical Chain Project Management, the definitive resource on how to succeed at CCPM, and Lean Project Management, the first book to bring Lean thinking to projects. Larry transfers his experience in working with the change to CCPM/LPM in a large number of companies to help you foresee the opportunities and challenges you will face in making it work in your company. His interactive team learning style and use of exercises throughout enhance adult learning.

Seminar Outline

Day One:

1. Appreciation for a system: Dr. Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints
2. Identify the single project constraint to project success.
3. Create the single project Critical Chain schedule.
4. Relate Critical Chain to the overall project system developed by the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK).
5. Size Critical Chain buffers.
6. Report and manage to buffers.

Day Two:

7. Identify the multi-project constraint.
8. Participate in a Multi-project simulation.
9. Create the multi-project schedule.
10. Manage buffers in the multi-project environment.
11. Implement Critical Chain Project Management in your organization.
12. Five exercises.

Extensive question and answer interchanges throughout.

All project managers can profit immediately from major course ‘take aways,’ regardless of whether your organization chooses to use CCPM as a standard or not.

Most effective for the organization when included as part of an implementation plan including 4 hour training of all project resources, establishing project priority and buffer management processes, and planning of on-going and upcoming projects. We can help you develop an organization wide implementation plan.

Cost: $1.200 per attendee.

Public Event in February, 2008

To enroll, call me at the number above.