Decided to put some of my notions into printing regarding project progress and see what mainly 2 somewhat popular methods does to help you, Scrum and Critical Chain/Buffer management (CC).
I would like state that there are 2 key factors to have great project performance. Speed and Steer. Speed = Implement and deliver with quality, Steer = Make sure the speed is directed in the right direction as well staying on the road.
1. Speed
First key is to the resources working without distractions in order achieve momentum and not spend time switching between different tasks etc. Or in more general term get around Parkinson’s Law to maintain focus throughout one task.
Scrum has defined the Sprint in order to get a development team it own undisturbed time to producing by setting the todo list fixed for 3-4 wks. If a task is not complete within the deadline it is excluded from the released and pushed back to the backlog.
With the same goal CC sets resources assigned to one task only and defines that the work time should be removed of distractions. If the development team does not meet the aggressive estimate of the task, they will continue on the task and use buffered time. The buffered time is the gather "slack" time of all tasks in the project ("slack" meaning the difference between the aggressive estimate and the realistic). This allows the team to handle Murphy’s Law.
The difference is mainly that scrum creates a release on a fixed date, and CC creates the release when the task is done.
2. Steer
The steer must be accurate and up to date, in order to stay on the right course.
Scrum has the backlog with a product owner giving the proper directions and Scrum master and daily scrums to actually staying on the road.
CC still has a planned scope as well, it does however point at the project finish date with the entire backlog included (and buffers for Murphy’s law), but the project will still be focusing on one task at the time, and task can be re-defined as easy as changing a backlog. The development team still has daily meetings during the implementation, but a project manager is usually not involved.
With these two general keys in place, the project speed and steer are covered. Still there are many details to achieve speed and steer, such daily development meetings, short weekly follow up but most of these exist in both methods.
I still think there are certain benefits with each method, depending on what kind of project you run.
Benefits in Scrum:
The main reason for choosing Scrum is that it will very quickly deliver executable code, since that is one of its main objects. It provides a stable structure where all members have one fixed point in an otherwise storming environment which are the releases.
Benefits in CC:
CC will have more easily cooping with external dependencies, since the project promise (deadline) will be more easily displayed. The stable ground for the team in this case is that they know they will release when the task is done.
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