About this Presentation
This masterclass introduces Critical Chain Project Management as the TOC solution to chronic project delay, overload, hidden safety, and unreliable priorities. Simon M White walks through the nature of the project problem, the direction of the CCPM solution, and the benefits organizations can expect when they stop optimizing locally and start managing projects as one system with one constraint. The session then unpacks the core concepts, anti-patterns, and control mechanisms of Critical Chain — including Student Syndrome, Parkinson’s Law, bad multitasking, aggregated buffers, critical chain, feeding buffers, resource buffers, and the Fever Chart — giving attendees a practical practitioner-level foundation for understanding how CCPM works and why it improves flow.
What Will You Learn
To help you get the most value from this session, we’ve highlighted a few key points. These takeaways capture the main ideas and practical insights from the presentation, making it easier for you to review, reflect, and apply what you’ve learned.
This masterclass makes the case that project underperformance is usually systemic, not personal. It points to unclear success criteria, too many concurrent projects, overloaded shared resources, hidden uncertainty inside task estimates, and late detection of trouble as the core causes behind poor project outcomes.
A major takeaway is that Critical Chain changes where safety lives. Instead of hiding protection inside every task, it strips out local safety and aggregates it into visible project and feeding buffers so uncertainty can be managed at the system level.
The session gives a very practical introduction to the main CCPM failure modes and patterns practitioners need to recognize: Student Syndrome, Parkinson’s Law in projects, bad multitasking, padding without aggregating, critical chain, project buffer, feeding buffer, resource buffer, Full Kitting, and the Fever Chart.
What makes the presentation especially useful is that it is not just conceptual. It ties CCPM to concrete benefits such as more reliable delivery dates, shorter lead times, better use of constrained resources, clearer priorities, and higher throughput across the portfolio, while also grounding the method in case evidence and practitioner-level learning.
Instructor(s)
Simon White
Simon White works for BAE Systems Australia as Manager of Project Controls. His current role is to ‘Deliver Reliable and Repeatable Project Control’ across a multi-billion dollar portfolio of +220 defense projects, spread over Air, Maritime and Software/Cyber domains. He was part of a successful application of CCPM to an Aerospace MRO environment, and this has been shared widely within the BAE business globally, as well as via TOCICO Global Conference, CCPM Global Conference, Project Control Expo UK and Aus, and more.