Discipline In Project Management

Bringing Discipline to
Project Management

by Jeffrey Elton and Justin Roe

Harvard Business Review
Reprint 98203

HarvardBusinessReview
MARCH–APRIL 1998
Reprint Number
k athleen M . eisenhardt
and shona l . brown

time pacing:
competing in m arkets that won’t stand still

98202

joan m agret ta

the power of virtual integr ation:
an interview with dell computer’s michaeldell

98208

richard k . lester , michael j.
piore, and k a m al m . m alek

interpretive m anagement:
what gener al m anagers can learn from design

98207

jean-fr ancois m anzoni
and jean-louis barsoux

the set-up-to-fail syndrome

98209

joseph l . badar acco, jr .

the discipline of building char acter

98201

shikhar ghosh

m aking business sense of the internet98205

robert galford

HBR CASE STUDY

why doesn’t this hr department get any respect?
paul sharpe
and tom keelin

john s. ha m mond,
r alph l . keeney,
and howard r aiffa
jeffrey elton
and justin roe

98204

ideas at work

how smithkline beecham m akes better
resource-allocation decisions

98210

manager’s tool kit

e ven swaps:
a r ational method for m aking trade-offs

98206

BOOKS IN REVIEW

bringing discipline to project m anagement

98203

BOOKS IN REVIEW

Eli Goldratt’s first novel,
The Goal, shook up the factory floor.
Will Critical Chain do the same for projects?

Bringing Discipline
to Project M a nage ment

by Jeffrey Elton and Justin Roe

Critical Chain
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
Great Barrington, Mass.
The North River Press, 1997How many projects in your organization have come in on time and on
budget? If you are like most senior
managers, the answer is likely none.
And that despite using a plethora
of project-management software
tools, management processes, data
management systems, team-training
programs, and assorted “best pracARTWORK BY HAL MAYFORTH

tices.” Every manager has an excuse
for why a given projectcomes out
poorly, but attempts to plan ahead
to allow for unexpected problems
rarely succeed.
Are these difficulties inescapable?
One business thinker who says no
is Eli Goldratt, a pioneer, if not the
originator, of the t heory of constraints. As introduced in his widely
read novel T he Goal, this theory
provided a persuasive solution for
factories struggling with production delays andlow revenues. In his

third novel, Critical Chain, Goldratt
applies the framework to managing
the development of new products
and other projects.
Project management is a mature
area that has systemic problems
similar to many found in manufacturing processes, and the theory of
constraints works well when dealJeffrey Elton is a principal and
Justin Roe a consultant at Integral,
amanagement-consulting company
based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.

BOOKS IN REVIEW

bringing discipline to project management

ing with individual projects. The
book falls short, however, in explaining how companies can best
manage a portfolio of projects, so
senior managers need to supplement it withother advice. Still, its
focus on constraints may be useful
for dealing with one of the most difficult and pressing of management
challenges: developing highly innovative new products.

Focusing on the Constraints
The theory of constraints explains
how to boost the performance of
any process that involves a series
of interdependent steps. Instead of
breaking the process down and improvingthe efficiency of each step,
the theory has managers focus on
the bottlenecks, or constraints, that
keep the process from increasing its
output. Once managers identify the
bottlenecks, they widen them by
making them more efficient – which
often means changing policies that
may promote efficiency at other
steps in the process but hamper
effectiveness at the crucial bottlenecks. Next, they...