“Overruns and Overdues”

Critical Chain by E.M Goldratt revolves around 3 sets of people, A Dean who foresees the direction in which business school is going to run out of business and tries to find her way around it, A lecture who needs to publish paper to secure his tenure and a group of students who need to find a way to finish a project well within unrealistic stipulated time. There are number of ways by which a project can either budget overrun or face overdue therefore it’s necessary to analyze each task of the project and in largescale projects it’s very important. There is also a need for proper synchronization of each task and the way of doing it is by critical path. We can also find a phenomenon called Student Syndrome in Organization where we adjust our level of effort to complete a task with given time in hand which usually leads to project or task overdue. Another thing we can notice is that most of the projects involve multitasking and these tasks need to be completed with same or different level of priorities and these often lead to loss of efficiency and thus leading to task incompletion and overdue.

Now as we know how a project can either face overrun or overdue, Goldratt has presented these solutions in his book

1) Theory of Constraints : Consisting of five stepsa) Identify the bottleneck.b) Exploit the bottleneck.c) Synchronize the output of lower level to higher level.d) Invest at lower levels to increase output.e) Start the process in time to identify new bottleneck.

2) Resource Buffer : This involves to keep resources in hand and in time to utilize so that it doesn’t affect critical path

3) Project Buffer : Any delay on longest chain of tasks in critical path may lead to delays, hence additional safety time should be allotted to avoid delays

4) Prioritization : As there are various multitask involved in project and each task needs money to complete them, proper resource prioritization should be allotted so that there is efficiency in task competition.

My Three Learnings:

1) If a task involves multiple steps, it is necessary to do in-depth analysis of time required to complete each step in order to complete task efficiently within time

2) Allocating different buffers like resource buffer, project buffer is very important in large projects, it also require very thorough analysis of critical path and identifying the bottlenecks

3) Prioritizing is very important in multitasking and it also helps in smooth flow of project.

Action Plan

As of now I am involved in task of pile execution at Barapullah Bridge Project Delhi, the problem I’ve seen is breakdown of MAIT machine which leads to delayed production of piles and also overdue by 3 to 4 days which also cause overrun. Solution for this could be keeping repair tools in hand to prevent delays. Also providing necessary buffer for these in project critical path for better project flow. Further when I get a chance to work in planning, I would like to initially study our contract documents, different stages, milestones and critical path and then do in-depth analysis of tasks for proper utilization of resources to help in project completion well within time.