About this Presentation
The Association for Project Management (APM) Senior Managers’ and Project Managers’ Guide to Critical Chain 2024, endorsed by the TOCICO Board and featuring a preface by Rami Goldratt, aims to elevate Critical Chain to mainstream prominence. Supported by TOCICO’s award-winning case studies, this guide seeks to become the most popular in APM’s history while advocating for CCPM’s inclusion in future editions of the APM’s Body of Knowledge.
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.
Critical Chain is a powerful tool in project management, but its adoption is hindered by lack of awareness among customers and suppliers.
Partnering with professional bodies like the Association for Product Management can help promote Critical Chain and make it mainstream.
Creating a guide for Critical Chain can be a useful tool in promoting its adoption. The guide should be short, concise, and provide references to other resources.
Instructor(s)
Rene Nibbelke
René Nibbelke, Strategy and Business Development Director at Goldratt UK
René is a transformation leader with more than 30 years of experience across the aerospace, maritime, and defense sectors. He specializes in accelerating delivery, removing organizational bottlenecks, and improving performance through practical systems thinking.
He joined Goldratt UK in 2026 after leading major improvement and transformation programs at BAE Systems and within the UK Ministry of Defense. Following his introduction to the Theory of Constraints (TOC) and Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) in 2020, René supported award-winning implementations across land, air, and maritime programs. He also played a central role in developing the Association for Project Management’s Senior Managers’ and Project Managers’ Guide to Critical Chain.
An Honorary Industrial Fellow at the University of Bristol, René combines extensive industry experience with academic rigor. He is a Chartered Project Professional, Chartered Quality Professional, and recipient of multiple industry awards, including TOCICO’s TOC Champion Award and Outstanding Implementation Awards for his work on major defense programs, including Challenger 3 and Hawk Jet MRO.
Simon White
Simon M White is Chair of TOCICO and a senior leader at WiseTech Global, where he works across enterprise delivery, organisational capability and education. Over a career spanning more than 30 years, he has led major projects and transformation initiatives across defence, logistics and technology in Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States and Saudi Arabia. Simon is a long-standing Theory of Constraints practitioner, speaker and advocate, with a particular interest in helping organisations see the system clearly, identify what is genuinely limiting performance, and improve flow. His work is grounded in a simple belief: capable people usually do not need fixing, but the systems around them often do.
Ian Heptinstall
Ian is an Associate Professor of Project Management at the University of Birmingham (UK).
He is a late-career academic, joining the University after 35 years of working in project management, procurement and management consulting.
His project & procurement experience primarily in the capex, construction & engineering fields.
He has been a regular TOCICO Conference attendee since 2011, and in 2020 he helped set up the annual Critical Chain virtual conference, to share CC real world experience with project management practitioners who have little or no knowledge of TOC or critical chain.
In 2016 he published “The Executive Guide to Breakthrough Project Management” about overcoming obstacles to using critical chain on capital/construction projects, in collaboration with Robert Bolton, and he supported Rene Nibbelke in producing the APM’s “Senior Managers’ and Project Managers’ Guide to Critical Chain” (2024