Last week Stickyminds.com published my article about Critical Chain Scheduling. I'm really pleased with the article. You'll find it very, very useufl if you work in an agile environment, like Scrum, where you make fixed-scope, fixed-deadline commitments every few weeks. It's really shockingly easy for an agile team to prepare a 1, 2,3 or 4 week long critical chain plan and my god it takes the stress off. I swear by it.
(If you work in an agile team where you have variable scope, fixed deadline commitments then you are very lucky and you'll still find the ideas in the article very useful).
I tried really hard, while writing this article, to get through the simple behavioural changes required to make Critical Chain work - the single-tasking, not-treating-estimates-as-committments, frequenty-re-estimating, and so on - but, judging by the comments at the bottom of the article, I think I failed. The folk who commented made very good points and I hope I answered their objections.
Critical Chain, as I've described, is a great way of rebuilding trust between managers and their staff. In fact, it is THE best way I've found. It's also sorely needed, judging by some of the comments.
