TOC Project Management Solution

For organizations and project managers who are working to improve their ability to continually meet the three seemingly illusive project commitments — budget, time and content, the TOC Project Management Solution provides a comprehensive tool set that addresses:

• The nature of project planning
• Project scheduling
• Resource behavior
• Project visibility and control
• Multiple project synchronization

Theory of Constraints and its Thinking Processes

The Five Focusing Steps of TOC

How can any generic solution have such broad applicability? It turns out that no matter what an organization’s offering is – products and/or services – the methods for most effectively and efficiently managing processes and resources are basically the same. To use another powerful analogy: just as the strength of a chain is dictated by its weakest link, the performance of any value-chain is dictated by its constraint. Recognizing this, the resulting steps to maximizing the performance of a value-chain are:

1. Identify the constraint.

2. Decide how to Exploit the constraint.

3. Subordinate and synchronize everything else to the above decisions

4. Elevate the performance of the constraint.

5. If in any of the above steps the constraint has shifted, go back to Step 1.

These are called the 5 Steps of TOC and provide the foundation for many of TOC’s generic solutions, which include, the management of processes, inventory, supply chains, product development and projects (single and multiple), personnel and decision-making.

Although the 5 Steps of TOC can be applied to every process at every level in an organization, which is how TOC is frequently often implemented, the true power - and results - comes from:

• Understanding the interdependencies between and across processes that contribute to delivering a product or service,

• Understanding the impact that those interdependencies and normal variability have on their combined, overall performance, and

• Appropriately buffering for interdependencies and normal variability so that that performance can be predictably and consistently high.