Teaching Critical Chain Project Management: The Academic Debate and Illustrative Examples

In recent decades, the project-scheduling practice known as critical chain project management CCPM has been successful in industrial applications, yet remains a subject of disagreement among scholars and is only sporadically taught in business schools. The purpose of this paper is to assess what aspects of CCPM are appropriate in operations courses, whether dedicated project management classes or broader introductory operations management classes. To answer this, we survey academic literature on traditional project management problems that gave rise to CCPM to understand if these issues are real. We also examine whether the CCPM methodology should, according to scholars, correct these problems, and survey project success stories attributed to CCPM. We conclude that CCPM is an appropriate project management methodology for student consideration on the basis of motivating critical thinking---especially about behavioral issues---rather than on formal scientific proof of its merit. In so doing, we survey teaching resources as well as articles in the trade press on the subject. We then present a sequence of numerical practice problems that are designed to motivate further critical reflection about CCPM. Throughout are a number of open questions about CCPM that the academic community has not yet answered and that instructors should keep in mind. Case Teaching Note: Interested Instructors please see the Instructor Materials page for access to the restricted materials. To maintain the integrity and usefulness of cases published in ITE, unapproved distribution of the case teaching notes and other restricted materials to any other party is prohibited.