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 Lean
Project Management: Eight Principles for Success, is actually a second edition of
the eBook Eight Secrets to Supercharge
your Project with CCPM. It is available both in hardcopy and eBook formats.
Lawrence Leach (www.advanced-projects.com)
is perhaps best known as author of one of the most comprehensive texts on the
subject of Critical Chain
Project Management (CCPM). In this book, subtitled "Combining CCPM and Lean tools to accelerate project results," the
author essentially integrates Lean Thinking into CCPM, along with elements from
the Theory of
Constraints (TOC) and PMBoK/PMI.
Leach calls the result Lean Project
Management or LPM.
The LPM book is split up into eight sections, one for each of the eight principles described in the book:
{sidebar id=1} The second section covers some of the basics of leadership (such as situational leadership, and team building) and then spends some time talking about project roles and responsibilities and the RACI method of defining them. However, the most useful part of the second section is the portion devoted to conflict management. Leach presents a useful matrix of conflict management strategies, then discusses their underlying flaw based in zero-sum thinking and how win-win thinking is preferred. All this is really just a lead-in to describing the evaporating cloud, which is TOC's powerful thinking process for conflict resolution (one of several thinking process in TOC). The section on chartering is short and simple, followed by a section on various problem-solving and solution design strategies that primarily summarizes QFD, Nadler and Hibino's breakthrough thinking, Debono's thinking tools, critical thinking, and TRIZ. I found the discussion of the limited information collection principle to be the most useful part of this section. Sections five and six are about managing variation and managing risk. I found the former section to be far more interesting than the latter (although the list of common errors in risk probability assessment was quite interesting). For risk management, Leach says it is all about managing special cause variation and recommends the basic PMBoK methods and tools for project risk management. For managing variation, Leach delves into common-cause versus special-cause variation and says that CCPM's buffers and buffer management are the most effective means of managing common cause variation in LPM. He then goes on to describe in depth the meaning and use of CCPM project buffers, feeding buffers, capacity constraint buffers, and cost buffers. Section seven dives into the details of project planning and provides tips on using various tools (such as MS Project) to do GANT/PERT charts, identifying the critical chain and size buffers. The most useful portions were those which mentioned which sorts of traditional planning activities were not particularly useful/needed for CCPM and how to use the more traditional project management tools do some CCPM-specific things. Section eight (Project Execution) discusses monitoring buffer penetration and when (and how) to take actions for buffer recovery. It also reminds us that "the most important function of the project leader during execution is to identify and reward success (on a weekly basis) and to celebrate major project milestones. All in all, I found Lean Project Management to be a fairly quick read providing a good overview of some TOC and CCPM fundamentals and how they align with Lean thinking, as well as how Lean thinking can be applied to some of more traditional PMBoK methods. Someone looking for a more comprehensive reference on TOC thinking processes and CCPM would probably be better off reading Goldratt's books, the work of William H. Dettmer, and the 2nd edition of Leach's Critical Chain Project Management. But for those wanting the bird's eye overview with a brief "zoom in" on some of the details, along with how Lean thinking helps tie it all together with some of the more traditional project management methods, Lawrence Leach's Lean Project Management is a nice overview text describing some of the most powerful aspects of TOC and CCPM through "Lean eyes for the PM guy!" About the Reviewer Brad Appleton is an enterprise SCM/ALM solution architect for a Fortune 100 technology company. Currently he helps projects and teams adopt and apply agile development & SCM practices. Brad also author's the Agile CM Environments blog, and is co-author of Software Configuration Management Patterns: Effective Teamwork, Practical Integration, the "Agile SCM" column in CMCrossroads.com's CM Journal, and is a former section editor for The C++ Report. Since 1987, Brad has extensive experience using, developing, and supporting SCM environments for teams of all shapes and sizes. He holds an M.S. in Software Engineering and a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics.
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