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

In recent decades, the project scheduling practices known as Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) have been successful in industrial applications, yet remain a subject of disagreement among scholars and 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. 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 if 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 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 that instructors should keep in mind.