Project Management

I've been studying the writings of Eliyahu Goldratt for some time and am very impressed with his work.

As a project manager for many years it frustrated me that despite endless planning and monitoring that most projects came in late and over budget. Mr. Goldratt helped me understand why that happens and what I can do about it.

With his methods, project times can be reduced significantly (up to 60%) and project managers can actually start to focus on what's important instead of spending their lives putting out fires.

I'll write a whole series on Mr. Goldratt's work, but just this one thought here, when you ask someone how long it will take to complete a given task, they usually formulate an answer that they have an 80-90% confidence in. However the time difference between a 50% chance of meeting the estimate and a 90% chance of meeting the estimate generally triples the time estimate. Getting that extra 30% certainty means that we are building in around 200% slack time. The sick thing is that we usually end up wasting the time we padded the estimate with. When we learn to get a good portion of that slack time back, our projects take a major step towards on time/on budget completion.