Name: Critical Chain
ISBN: 9780884271536

Critical Chain

Powerful yet simple techniques to solve project management s toughest problems. This book teaches companies to drastically cut project development times resulting in early completion within budget and without compromising quality or specifications. Project managers and your teams will benefit from Goldratt's techniques of how to remain focused on the few critical areas and how to prevent your attention from being divided among all of the how to prevent your attention from being divided among all of the projects tasks and resources. Especially useful for dealing with one of the most difficult and pressing management challenges: developing highly innovative new products.

What Hacker News says

telesillaJun 2023

I listened to 40 hours of Moby Dick on a series of long road trips and couldn't wait to start each one, just me and Melville for a few hours every day.

On a business level, Critical Chain (Goldratt) and the Phoenix Project (Kim, Spafford, Behr) were necessary eye-openers once I got into top management.

thread

caseymarquisMay 2022

I think this is a little of column A and a little of column B. Just as there are good and bad developers, there are people who are good and bad at running projects and organizations. The author feels that something is wrong. He knows he is not working anywhere near his full capacity and that the organization created this environment. He also highlights a lack of growth opportunities at some companies. What he doesn't do is highlight solutions or recognize why certain behaviors are key in certain environments.

Toward that end, I would recommend three old and poorly written books with timeless and wonderful ideas: The Goal, Critical Chain, and Managing Corporate Lifecycles.

While these books are all about management and running a company, I think they lend perspective to developers on why certain things happen the way they do. They can also help someone recognize and pick a healthy organization to work in. Just like books on software development, these books augment experience, they don't replace the need for it.

thread

JtsummersFeb 2022

IMHO, this book is better read after at least reading Goldratt's The Goal. It's a sort of spiritual sequel. His Critical Chain is also worth reading before or after The Phoenix Project as it has a more direct connection.

The Goal, as written, is about manufacturing processes and a lot of people have trouble seeing past that domain when reading it. That is, they fail to generalize, or understand how to generalize, the ideas of Theory of Constraints. Critical Chain takes, essentially, the same Theory of Constraints and applies it to project management, versus production management. The Phoenix Project continues that sort of explicit extension by moving from general project management to IT systems management.

thread

webmavenJun 2021

'The Deadline: A novel about project management' by Tom DeMarco

Critical Chain by Eliyahu M. Goldratt

The Unicorn Project by Gene Kim (sequel to the Phoenix Project)

Makers by Cory Doctorow

Daemon & Freedom™ by Daniel Suarez

The Affinities by Robert Charles Wilson

Zodiac by Neal Stephenson

The Blue Ant trilogy (Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History) by William Gibson

Omnitopia: Dawn by Diane Duane

Walkaway by Cory Doctorow

Autonomous by Annalee Newitz

The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

Reamde by Neal Stephenson

Lock In by John Scalzi

Rascal Money by Joseph Garber

thread

crdrostDec 2020

If you liked this article, you might like the book The Goal or its application to the “project context” that software companies find themselves in, Critical Chain. They define a lot of business thinking as being focused on controlling costs, when in fact you want to first maximize revenues, and the kind of funky idea of measuring “dollar days” that one eventually gets to is an attempt (which I actually don't think is successful, but maybe it is approximately okay) to start to bring cash flow ideas to consciousness.

I believe The Goal is where I first read about this idea about cash flow being more important than revenue, in a way that can be easily explained to anybody: you have bills, you have a certain amount in the bank, and then you have in accounting a set of invoices that you have sent out to customers but they have not yet been paid. So that money is “as good as earned” on paper but it’s not yet in the bank. And the problem is not revenue, the problem is cash flow. If you don’t have enough in that bank account, then after paying for your materials and rent for your building and whatever else, you suddenly come up short on payroll. “Please forgive me,” you tell your employees, “we have the money and your paychecks will just be a week late, we are so sorry, this never happens normally.” Good way to lose a lot of your best minds that really make your money—your best salespeople, your best engineers, your hardest workers. They got rent to pay. In The Goal I believe the book points out that most companies that go under don’t have a revenue problem but a cash flow problem, the money isn’t coming in fast enough to pay to keep the company running even though it is coming in eventually.

there are a couple of other ways to look at it that may be helpful to the broader community, one of them is that your interest rate on debt actually sets a time scale for your “indefinite future.” If you have credit card debt at 36%/year compounded monthly that’s 3%/month, flip that to (1 month)/(.03) = 33 months. Now if I ask you “hey, how much is that $20 per month subscription worth to you in terms of present value?” you can answer: that subscription runs out into the indefinite future so it gets multiplied by this time scale and it is worth $660 to me right now. Which is another way to say equivalently that if I bought something right now for $660 I would pay $20/month for the indefinite future. Lots of people don’t realize how much present value they can unlock by just canceling out old subscriptions like that, because the cash flow is not there immediately, but it’s true.

Similarly, I ran into cash flow issues at the beginning of this year in my personal finances. With COVID-19 hitting at around the same time my auto loan asked me if I wanted several months deferral. Are you shitting me right now? Yes, the added productivity and lack of stress from having a floating several hundred dollars in the bank and therefore being able to set up auto-pay (and not incurring late fees on all my accounts) pays for itself and then some. Thank you so much! (Of course the bank is a bank, this is cold hard calculus to them, so I don't feel too bad. Imagine that, too, though! Imagine that if you are in a good cash flow position, as the bank is as covid starts, your reaction might actually be to turn away cash flow: you are a sort of landlord collecting rents and you need to mitigate the risk that all your tenants go broke, they need to be able to keep their jobs for your wellbeing. And then you think of the actual landlords and you realize that the system must have left them relatively strapped for cash if they’re not similarly absorbing some of the shock. And that launches into interesting questions about feedback mechanisms in complex systems and their modes of resilience.)

thread

JtsummersJul 2020

Following on from The Goal are It's Not Luck and Critical Chain. The latter of those is particularly good in combination with the more recent Phoenix Project.

Each of these books is a bit utopian or idealistic. By doing what's suggested by the guru everything magically works out. But, while not magical, the ideas really do work and help operate and understand organizations. The principles are not complex, each book can probably be summarized in a 3-5 page paper. But the "case study" (quotes because it's a fictional plant/company, not just one obscured by pseudonyms) is good for illustrating the point and the path of process improvement.

thread