Key-chain Management In R & D Industry

"Critical chain" is the deployment of Theory of Constraints in project management, since Dr. Goldratt introduced Theory of Constraints. It has been deployed in manufacturing as a brand-new management theory, and gets huge success.Later, Dr. Goldratt introduced this theory to project management, named as Critical chain. It can solve typical project management issues, such as project delay, waste of effort etc.This paper tries to introduce this method to brain-power business, which highly depends on manpower intelligence and hard to measure individual performance, by comparing to traditional project management method, analyzing the major issues of deploying it in brain-power project management, we can get a whole picture of Critical Chain, the theory behind it and major characteristics,furthermore, it can provide references on mass deployment in this area.Critical chain focuses on the resource constraints'impact to project management. In traditional project management, we use critical path to management project schedule, by calculating longest path in project development plan, but not consider the capacity of resources, especially critical resource. This method tries to find a path to fully utilize all resources without confliction by balance critical resource usage, we call it Critical Chain.It emphasizes how to plan and manage project schedule by utilizing limited resource and eliminating bad multi-task, and use Project Buffer, Feeding Buffer to monitor whole project status.Different from traditional project management method, Critical Chain not only takes the relationship of tasks, and constraints of task into consideration, but also uses organizational behaviors theories in project schedule management,by this method; it gives us a new approach for effective project schedule management.