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Craig Larman discounts Critical Chain

There is an interesting Lean IT debate shaping up.

Most followers of Lean are familiar with Eli Goldratt, the widely respected author of The Goal.

Goldratt has gone on to write a number of other well known books, including one on project management called Critical Chain, which I have read and found interesting - but difficult at best to apply (runs into a computationally intractable conundrum known as the Resource Constrained Scheduling Problem). 

The Agile movement owes a great deal to Lean philosophy, and Craig Larman is a well respected author in this movement. Recently, (with co-author Vas Bodde) he published a notable work Scaling Lean and Agile Development. The book addresses a couple of trends I have been tracking: the use of Systems Dynamics modeling, and the application of Lean principles to IT management.

Systems Dynamics is explored and found useful at a conceptual level, but with skepticism towards the use of actual simulation tools. And the comments on Goldratt and Critical Chain are pointed:

"In the 1990s Goldratt extended TOC to project management for product development work...Official "project management TOC" ...involves specialized courses, tools, and coaching from the Goldratt Institute or authorized providers. It includes a relatively complex and detailed plan-and-control centralized management system with detailed task assignment to people, intensive upfront estimation and scheduling in detailed Gantt charts, and several other traditional management practices.

"Bottom line: We have seen two very large official "project management TOC" adoption attempts (and heard of one more) in companies developing software-intensive embedded systems... The practice was clearly heavy, not agile, and not lean. In all three cases, the approach was eventually found cumbersome and not very effective, and was dropped."

So, one of the leading lights of the Agile movement has thrown down the gauntlet to the TOC advocates.

I am as yet undecided in this. One can't dismiss Larman, and yet the Goldratt reasoning behind Critical Chain is also sound. Could an Evaporating Cloud assist in resolving this? Inquiring minds want to know.

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