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:
Project System
Leading People
Chartering
Right Solution
Managing Variation
Project Risk Management
Project Plan
Execution
The first
section is possibly the most useful one in the whole book (and a free excerpt
is available online from the TenStepStore.com). It is all about how to see
the whole project delivery system (people, process, products, and their
interrelationships) and optimize its throughput in the manner appropriate to
your projects, organization, and environment. Some basic concepts and
principles of PMBoK, Lean, TOC and CCPM are introduced and Leach shows how they
can work together for both single and multi-project management. I particularly
like how the author relates the use of various CCPM concepts (such as "buffers")
to the application of Lean principles when regarding the project delivery
pipelines as the value stream through which flow/throughput should be optimized
(something also espoused by David
Anderson's Agile Management, which is referred in this first section).
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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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