ADDITIVE RULE:
The commitments for duration and total cost of a project are based upon adding up the duration and cost of the individual tasks.

PARKINSON’s LAW:
Work expands to fill its time.

3-MINUTE EGG RULE:
It’s not quality if it’s finished before the time is up.

STUDENT SYNDROME:
Waiting to start a task due to more important work at hand.

Theory of Constraints Project Management

The Main Roots - Identifying "What to Change?"

In order to make significant and lasting improvements in the way projects are managed, an organization must effectively address the underlying root causes that lead to the above problems.

The dominant root cause in organizations performing multiple projects with shared resources is the unavoidable conflict about when to begin new project work. In almost every organization, there are continual internal and external pressures to address important new opportunities. At the same time, managers recognize that beginning new work too soon may divert needed resources from ongoing project work, compromising their ability to meet existing commitments. Unfortunately, with imperfect knowledge of the true status of current project work, ongoing pressures to increase the organization’s output, and a belief that delaying a project’s start will only serve to delay it’s finish, managers all too frequently make decisions that overload the organization.

The root cause that dominates the execution of individual projects is a planning and scheduling process that is based on several erroneous assumptions. One such assumption is the widespread belief that placing protection time in every task will lead to optimized project performance – that good individual task performance will inherently lead to good overall project performance. Couple this with the fact that today’s most widely used scheduling algorithms don’t provide proper protection for the effects of integrating pathways (many parallel paths of work, all of which must be completed before a common successor task may begin), don’t correctly address resource dependencies, and don’t properly account for task and iteration variability, and the stage is set for almost certain disaster (See Figure 1). These algorithms calculate overly optimistic schedules that will almost certainly throw the project into expensive firefighting once it is recognized that the commitment is in serious jeopardy. Rushed up-front planning aggravates this situation by missing out important task and resource dependencies.

Figure 1. Today’s widely used scheduling algorithms don’t provide proper protection for the way in which projects are mapped.

Ultimately, firefighting becomes rampant, most people become severely multi-tasked, and management institutes coping mechanisms for more and more tracking of individual task and budget performance - ultimately resulting in more overhead and adding even more “protection time” to task estimates in an attempt to guarantee that people’s work will meet management’s expectations.

Under such circumstances, people begin to place a higher priority on self-preservation. Being measured on individual task performance, people realize that it is not in their best interest to report early finishes. They may feel it will compromise their future negotiations or they may worry about being blamed for problems in their work because they did not take all the time they were given. More than likely, the task completion criteria are also very vague and people even feel encouraged to work well beyond what is truly good enough. At the same time, since most people carry such heavy loads, just the knowledge that the “protection time” is there makes them believe it is possible to use some of that time to finish other, more time-critical work.

The net result is that work that could have been turned in early is not and the project has little chance to take advantage of any “positive variation.” The effect of late tasks accumulates day-by-day while any potential for early task completion is almost completely masked.

Unless these two major root causes are addressed effectively, there is little chance for any organization to make significant and lasting improvements in project management performance.