[Planner] Hello... requests, questions.. Critical Chain processing?

[Roberto Leibman <roberto leibman net>]

Hi,

I've been managing technical projects on and off for a while now, and 
everytime I find myself in such a position I start working on my own 
project management tool because frankly all out there suck. They suck in 
very essential ways; there are fixes and add-ons to some of them which 
make them better, but even with that they just don't work. I was even 
beta tester for a while for both MS Project and one of the tools on the 
market (ProChain).
Have any of you looked at Theory of Constraints type project management? 
I believe that it holds a big key into things that would really make 
planner stand out from everything else, without the need of making it 
overly complex or add every feature under the sun.

I love the simplicity of Planner, and I really think it would be a great 
starting point for the kind of thing I have in mind.

The number one mistake that  current tools make, according to Critical 
Chain thinking is that they all make a very basic assumption that is 
VERY wrong: tasks always take a fixed duration (or fixed work). In 
reality all tasks are much better modeled as a probability of a task 
completing in a given amount of time. Though the Gantt chart (such a 
powerful visualization tool) as we know it would have to change 
significantly to reflect this change, and as it stands now it is a Bad 
Thing (Gantt Chart considered harmful).

Critical Chain project management solves, in a very elegant way, the 
whole problem with resource leveling, the self-fulfilling-prophecy task 
padding everyone seems to use and I've found that it makes project 
management much more focused (you end up looking at very few numbers, 
buffers to see how a project is doing), but there aren't any tools to 
ease the pain, and shoe-horning current tools is such a bother I end up 
using excel (or these days ooffice) to manage.

Here's a good textbook on the subject:

   
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1574441957/ref=pd_sbs_b_1/002-6900978-8236061?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance

I've found that I can take the leveling algorithms it provides and 
manually level (plus calculate and automatically insert buffer tasks) by 
hand, it shouldn't be too hard to use it to level resources.

I also like the approach ProChain (a MS Project add-on I used briefly) 
takes to update project progress, instead of asking about percentages, 
everytime the manager sits to update the project he/she uses a wizard 
and updates the number of days remaining on each task currently in the 
pipeline (i.e. those not done but whose predecessors are all done), 
since new knowledge comes in every day, this number is not always what 
you expect, but it is used to update the project in a much more accurate 
way.

Anyway, enough of my rant... have these ideas been considered at all?

I'm not doing much management these days, and I only remembered because 
I opened up planner for a small project I'm working on alone (which 
negates the need for critical chain leveling) and decided to write this 
note after a cursory glance to the list archives to see if this has been 
addressed.

Perhaps I've picqued some developer's interest, or perhaps next time I'm 
managing projects I'll go through the trouble of hacking into Planner to 
get it to do what I want.

What do you think?

Roberto