TOCICO

Bharat Sharma shares a 24-month Critical Chain Project Management journey inside a complex defence program, beginning with a major transition from an old platform to a new production facility, location, machines, manufacturing methods, material specifications and workforce. The familiar belief that “we have done this before” had previously produced a 5,000-line integrated master schedule, repeated schedule versions, assumption-driven planning, team conflict, delays, cost overruns and firefighting. The CCPM journey began with a pilot in July 2024, moved through a project charter and two months of focused planning, launched in December 2024, and then expanded during ongoing execution. A central lesson was to plan before scheduling. The team started with a clear definition of DONE, built the logic before attaching dates, clarified handovers from facilities to production, and created the plan with the delivery team rather than treating it as the project manager's plan. Sharma emphasizes that the visible Critical Chain plan is only the tip of the iceberg: trust, communication, ownership, accountability, discipline, decision-making, leadership and resource behavior determine whether CCPM actually works. Execution discipline included daily CCPM stand-ups that were not cancelled, one integrated plan, honest real-time updates, early surfacing of issues, owned recovery actions and weekly leadership reviews. The team managed the buffer rather than the calendar, using the Critical Chain to set priority, align resources and focus management attention where recovery was needed. Problems did not disappear - supplier delays, technical issues, resource bottlenecks, infrastructure problems and quality NCRs remained - but their impact became visible earlier and action came sooner. The program absorbed roughly ten major shocks, including production-cell delays, legislation changes, export issues and power upgrades, with a potential impact of more than 12 months. By challenging assumptions, prioritizing as a team and focusing management attention on the Critical Chain, the team used buffer recovery to contain the impact and protect the baseline. Sharma is equally candid about what did not work: one-time training was insufficient, old habits returned, new joiners diluted knowledge, remaining-duration countdowns could distort behavior and the software tool risked becoming the focus. His conclusion is that execution discipline beats planning sophistication, leadership behaviour determines adoption, retraining never stops, and the transformation continues from CCPM for delivery into Drum-Buffer-Rope and constraint management for production flow.