Shireen Akhlaq 2011-NUST- MBA (N) -40 MBA-2k11 (B)

Assignment 2: The Critical Chain

Critical chain is a book written by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, and it explores the concepts and issues revolving around projects, their management and the tools and techniques used to measure success for projects. The book focuses on getting the concepts across to the reader in a conversational style, including the fact that the book is mostly dialogue between the teachers and their students in different settings. The writer has tried to avoid vagueness while trying to explain the concepts that might be relatively new to managers specifically those involving the comparison of cost world and throughput world. Furthermore, it goes on to cover scheduling concerns and estimates, and the concept of inserting safety into total project time, as well as individual tasks. Also, in an attempt to protect individual efficiency of the tasks or activities of the project, the efficiency of the entire project is put at stake, by involving departments into multitasking and claiming emergencies where they do not exist. The book also covers the five steps of the theory of constraints, denoted as TOC in the book mainly as identify, exploit, subordinate, elevate and inertia, and it is these five steps that enable the main character of the book to overcome the obstacles that he is facing in his subject. After this has been done, the concept of resource buffers and bottlenecks is introduced, along with the correct way to deal with these bottlenecks. The author also tries to cover the issue of resource contention in the case of multiple resource sinks or activities that use up the same resources. The book then moves on to cover multiple projects and how to handle constraints and bottlenecks that are spread over multiple projects. Finally, the author goes onto claim that the current methods used to measure the attractiveness of investments are ineffective, and comes up with an alternate method of measuring the cost of money in dollar days, that take into account both the aspects of money and time, rather than payback period and NPV that see both these aspects as separate. Overall the book made a riveting read, while providing a good learning experience on the way.