Critical Chain

Project Management and the Theory of Constraints

By: Eliyahu M. Goldratt

Narrated by: Alexander Cendese, Rick Adamson, Tavia Gilbert

A young, untested team of problem solvers challenged with saving their company moves from board room to classroom in search of answers - and finds them through lively, open discourse with their innovative professor. This gripping, fast-paced business novel does for project management what Eliyahu M. Goldratt's other novels have done for production and marketing.

©1994 2014 Goldratt1 Ltd. (P)2014 HighBridge Company

Critic reviews

"This is valuable to two main audiences: project managers and senior managers...useful for dealing with one of the most difficult and pressing management challenges: developing highly innovated new products." ( Harvard Business Review)

Ideas intriguing, writing/direction acceptable

The ideas in this novel are at least smart: I cannot say yet if they are as brilliant as the ideas in /The Goal/, but they come from the same place. As you’ll remember, in /The Goal/ the central purpose of a company is to maximize profit, translated from an accountant’s global perspective (having enough money in the bank to not die, then keeping ROI up while simultaneously investing as much as won't kill you) to a physicist’s local perspective (you have some queue of orders that already strategically matches the ROI goals, you can assume you will handle all of them eventually, so your goal is to reduce the time between when an order comes in and when it leaves: this alone maximizes your profit per unit time, and it is worth making many steps inefficient if it improves this lead time).

The central question here is, most of the strategies of /The Goal/ concern having variable order streams for the same 50 products, but many companies instead face a situation where your queue of orders contains unique products: how do we optimize /that/? In other words what happens in a context where you cannot reasonably identify bottlenecks in order throughput, because the orders have no shared structure that can be used to define a “bottleneck”?

The book like its predecessor tacks on personal conflicts to humanize the material, but here they fall much more flat. Goldratt’s narrative switches between points of view in order to present information that the main character, a college professor, would not have been privy to: but it is debatable that this is necessary in the first place. The bigger problem is that the narrator is not being changed so much by the journey he has embarked upon. One might imagine that a college professor has a lot of personal tasks that could be thought of as projects, and so there would be a personal journey to this story: if so, that is extremely implicit.

The book realizes the scattered points of view by switching actual physical narrators, which is extremely jarring, especially when they do not agree on the pronunciation of the central company GeneModem. Alexander Cendese is not a bad narrator but his voice has a charming gravelly-ness to it that unfortunately makes the characters bleed together, when you interrupt him in this way with folks who do not have that same vocal texture. With /The Goal/ I may have questioned the running soundtrack but the ensemble of voice actors seen there truly would have helped here: Rather than trying to pick out two different narrators’ takes on one character as “the same” it would have been nice if that character were just always voiced by the one.

Great way of explaining TOC

It's been one of the best ways to understand the TOC applicable to PM. I'm only sorry of not reading it sooner.

fun listen, great nuggets for forsight

I thought I would not like it, I ended up putting in better placement in my reading rotation. I will probably get more from this author.

extremely valuable

the story keeps you interested and is very relatable. It teaches you to think like a manager but is not boring at all.

A project managers must read!

A great book. This book has multiple voices for the different roles. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Character voices change

In some points the character voices would change, which sometimes made it difficult to know who was speaking. After figuring out who was speaking, the book became clear to understand, just took a moment.

An outstanding piece of work that is still cutting edge even today

Goldratt’s critical chain still sets the standard for project management even today. Most companies still rely on critical path as the means of controlling a project. Critical chain clearly defines why this is not appropriate, particularly for organizations that are running multiple projects simultaneously. Watching both the critical path, the longest list of dependent activities, and the management of the critical chain, the longest set of critical activities by both time and critical resources, as well as the integration of buffers at key intersects is still the cutting edge, method of managing projects and programs. This should be required reading in any business school or engineering school. As a career engineer, engineering manager, and project decision maker, I still rely on this book after almost a decade of experience and a MBA. I encourage all my younger staff to read it.

Hated the changing voices

I had high hopes that the multiple voice actors would mean a female would play the female parts and the two men would play the key characters from the book. I was disappointed. Some chapters were read by the female doing all parts and others were by one or the other men. There was one chapter where it sounded like the men changed mid-sentence. I loved the book and I can't wait to apply TOC to my projects but the recording really threw me for a loop.

Excellent concepts!

Great follow-on to The Goal for those more interested in projects than manufacturing. However, both processes are related. This book will explain. I highly recommend this book. I only wished that I had read it years ago.

A great book for all!

This is a great book for anybody. Whether you are planning for business or your personal life, this book gives great insight to why things go wrong in your plans and how to correct the way you plan to become successful!