Although our POOGI relies heavily on the use
of TOC, many times key areas within organizations (e.g. maintenance, project
management, etc.) need more. Consider a
scheduled maintenance process for a company whose function is to maintain
helicopters. Each helicopter was
considered an individual project with individual tasks that must be completed
in a specific period of time. Because
the scheduled maintenance process is an iterative, repetitive process with
inevitable uncertainty present, we need a project management method that not
only considers this uncertainty, but also helps us deal with it,
Most companies use a methodology referred to
as the Critical Path Method (CPM) and although it’s presumably a good method,
we still see many projects coming in late, over budget and many times the
original scope has been reduced in an attempt to bring the project in on
time. In the next several postings I
want to talk a bit about a different project management methodology known as
Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM).
And the way I will do so is via a head to head comparison between CPM
and CCPM. CCPM is a Theory of
Constraints based method which was first written about in a book written by Dr.
Eliyahu Goldratt appropriately entitled, Critical
Chain Project Management. If you
work in a project management based organization, then I highly recommend this
book.
I might add that this next series of postings is a combination of
material Bruce Nelson wrote that is found in the Appendix of Epiphanized and a paper that my son John
Sproull and I wrote.
Several years ago I worked for a Maintenance,
Repair and Overhaul (MRO_ contractor to the US Army. The contractor was charged with maintaining
the Army’s fleet of helicopters and when I arrived there, I must say things
were a mess. The contractor was
responsible for having a set number of ready-to-fly helicopters several times
throughout the day. If the contractor
fell short of this number, then penalties were assessed. Most of the helicopters came directly from
the contractor’s unscheduled maintenance area, but some came from their
scheduled maintenance area. In the scheduled
maintenance area, there were a set number of days that the aircraft could be in
scheduled maintenance, and I must say, for the most part, the contractor was
not delivering the contracted amount. It
is the scheduled maintenance process that I want to direct my writing to for
the next series of posting.
When I first walked into my first aircraft
hangar to observe the scheduled maintenance process, I was amazed. I had no prior MRO experience, so I had no
frame of reference to compare it to.
What I saw were mechanics crawling all over the Blackhawk helicopters,
doing something. There were large graphs
in front of each helicopter telling whoever wanted to know the status of these
beautiful birds and in almost every case, the contractor was behind schedule. I spoke with many of the mechanics and they
told me that if I think this is bad, take a look outside. I walked outside and found 12 helicopters
wrapped in foil indicating that they had been frozen and not being worked. The overall WIP in just this one hangar was
nearly 20 aircraft, meaning that they were in a partial state of overhaul and
could not be flown. It was immediately
obvious to me why they were missing their contractual obligations since 20
birds in the fleet were tied up in scheduled maintenance.
The
contractor had been using Critical Path Project Management (CPM) and it was
clear to me that it simply wasn’t working.
For those of you not familiar with CPM, I want to start by explaining how
it actually works. If you ask a typical project manager about
what factors delayed a completed project, most will tell you that something
they hadn’t planned for or even had no control over cropped up in some of the
tasks and delayed them. This is another
way of saying that uncertainty or the Murphy bug bit them! We know that every project from virtually every
environment has uncertainty associated with it and how this uncertainty is
dealt with determines the ultimate success or failure of the project. So in order for a project to be successful,
there must be a way to protect it from uncertainty.
In my next few series of posting we’ll take a
look at how traditional project management (CPM) attempts to protect a project
from inevitable uncertainty and then compare it to TOC’s version of project
management referred to as Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM).
Bob Sproull
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