Large scale infrastructure projects focused on building or repairing mass transportation systems, communication networks, power grids and public utilities require vast resources, community-wide support and disciplined management. Without consensus, focus and commitment, these multi-year, multi-million dollar initiatives can quickly stretch out of scope, over budget and off schedule. Local, state and federal government agencies are [...]

Breakthroughs in project performance can be achieved in these two ways: (1) Improve upon what you are currently doing; and (2) Change the rules by which you manage projects. The rules created as a result of the three biggest project management challenges have caused you to falsely limit your organization’s potential for excellence. By understanding [...]

In Necessary But Not Sufficient, Dr. Eli Goldratt provided some guidelines to help us evaluate and leverage the introduction of a new technology. He reasoned that a new technology can bring new benefits if and only if it enables people to overcome one or more limitations of existing technologies. What is limiting major construction and [...]

#4. EXECUTION Performance improvement initiatives are projects. When projects are poorly executed, benefits are lost and penalties are incurred. This includes opportunity costs associated with wasted resource potential. Critical Chain Project Management, a component of the Theory of Constraints toolkit, accelerates Lean Six Sigma projects and is the gold standard for resource management. 12 Days [...]

NOVACES has developed an innovative solution that looks beyond the normal Incident Command System (ICS) planning cycle and predictably identifies personnel, materials, equipment and costs over the entire course of an emergency response. This new application provides response teams a better analysis of the scope, resources and costs throughout completion of an incident. The National [...]

In Project Paradise?, criteria for a successful project management solution were identified and it was claimed that the initial aim of the solution should be reliability. Nobody ever said that delivering projects reliably was easy. According to the most recent edition of the often-cited Standish Group report¹, 68% of software application development projects fail to [...]

Dr. Russell Ackoff, a pioneer of systems thinking said, “If you don’t know what you would do if you could do whatever you wanted to, how in the world are you going to know what to do when you’re under constraints?”1 The late Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt, founder of theory of constraints and critical chain [...]