Essay Example on Book introduction Critical chain is a novel written by Eliyahu Goldratt

Book introduction Critical chain is a novel written by Eliyahu Goldratt It is a book which act as a know how to guide for aspiring project managers in industry It was published by the North River Press on 4th September 1997 The book has many real life examples which help us to understand the the theory of project management in a more realistic and engaging way 2 Primary Core idea of the book The book revolves around many philosophies and tries to highlight key concerns in current practices and system It attempts to bring a difference in the educational systems for better understanding of change in business world The novel effectively points out the problems regarding how time estimates are normally carried out on projects It also tries to explain the concept of Theory of Constraints with an example of its implementation in a steel mill It further shows the application of topic Theory of Constraints and how it can be incorporated in case of multiple projects create easy generation of schedule and manage resources constraints 3 The story The book starts with the description of activities happening at a modem company of name Genemodem 

Over there the management is demanding to shorten the process of the product development because they believe that if they did not do that then they would lag behind the market They appoint three young managers One from the development one from finance and one from marketing department They are given responsibility to find a method to shorten the lead time of product development Their mission was to shorten their current project of 2 years to 6 months The main story is about a person named Rick Silver He is a young associate professor of business He is apparently struggling to create an impact and make a noteworthy contribution to the academic world in field of project management He seeks to get a tenure and is in need of publications He desperately wants a tenure because he is facing personal and financial problems at home which he things can be resolved if he gets the tenure But the university manger B J decides to reject new tenure applications including that of Rick Silver s to avoid financial disaster as she realized that MBA programmes are not giving desired value to students Now rick has to teach project management course to those recruited 3 young managers from Genemodem He is a very good teacher and conducts interactive learning in his lecture to his students at Executive MBA class In first class 

The solution that they found to decrease lead time on Genemodem project is to decrease time for each critical path steps by half The time that is saved by cutting each step into half is added to the end of path and the terminology used to describe it is project buffer For non critical path cut the steps of estimated original time by half The half of the remaining cut lead time was call feeding buffer time In the end the university is able to find solution to the market value demand And hence professor rick silvers financial as well as personal problems also resolve 4 Review of the book With various examples and analogies we get to learn about the theory of project management We are also highlighted upon concepts of resource bottlenecks multiple project resource constraints cost of money bell curve median etc The book also points out issues in current education system like student syndrome not claiming early competition and multitasking inefficiency