Critical Chain

Business Fiction - A New Genre

This book is horrific from a literary perspective - shallow, predictable characters with almost soap-opera like qualities. Please ignore the slow start where these unimpressive characters are introduced.

This book is brilliant because of the way it weaves a deeper meaning and education of project management into a plausible and interesting plotline, which makes up for the characters that carry it.

This book is not for the uninitiated. It's chocked full of jargon and concepts that people who have never studied project management would never understand. For those who have had a course or two on project management or even a weeklong seminar and for whom project management is a reality, the book has a clarity and focus that reaches beyond anything I've seen in any period of instruction on the topic. However, you must speak the project management language to follow the gist of the book.

As someone who has managed projects for years and studied project management, this book helped me achieve a new level of thinking and analysing business models, assumption, problems, workflows and more.

This book is truly brilliant. Did I start out by saying its bad literature? It is. And it's brilliant!

15 sur 17 personne(s) ont trouvé cet avis utile.

Hated the changing voices

I had high hopes that the multiple voice actors would mean a female would play the female parts and the two men would play the key characters from the book. I was disappointed. Some chapters were read by the female doing all parts and others were by one or the other men. There was one chapter where it sounded like the men changed mid-sentence. I loved the book and I can't wait to apply TOC to my projects but the recording really threw me for a loop.

3 sur 3 personne(s) ont trouvé cet avis utile.

Lack of Different Voices & Hard to Understand

Didn't like the lack of different voices. Male and female roles were by a male. Only one male voice throughout. The book is all over the place and hard to follow and understand. This issue only makes it even more of a challenge.

2 sur 2 personne(s) ont trouvé cet avis utile.

Just alright

Any additional comments?

I purchased this book as someone who has never been in a Project Management role and wanted to learn more about the position. I was able to learn the basics through some of the use cases in the book and some interesting points I would have never thought about. However, overall I found myself losing interest as the book continued and felt like I wasn't learning anything new past the halfway point.

One byproduct that I did take from the audio though is a great way of teaching a class. I instruct classes and I really liked the teachers methods in delivering his material.

5 sur 6 personne(s) ont trouvé cet avis utile.

Casting characters to voices would improve this

The insights in this book are fantastic, but the narration was hard to follow. Female characters and male characters were voiced by different narrators in different chapters. This made it much harder to follow than necessary.

The last chapter seemed incongruous with the rest, and wasn't satisfying, but I appreciated the insight it offered on justifying investments.

1 sur 1 personne(s) ont trouvé cet avis utile.

A Must Read for any business library!

Excellent and accessible for a wide audience. The best and most complete explanation for significant theories.

1 sur 1 personne(s) ont trouvé cet avis utile.

A link of manufacturing to projects

As a manufacturing engineer, this is the most relevant book I've read to drive project completion. Easy to follow, entertaining, and educational. A link of the structured manufacturing flow to project flow that makes sense, and it's sustainable.

1 sur 1 personne(s) ont trouvé cet avis utile.

Classic TOC Novel

May not be Shakespeare, but communicates the fundamental precepts of Critical Chain in an entertaining way. I recommend this for anyone interested in TOC.

1 sur 1 personne(s) ont trouvé cet avis utile.

Not as easy to follow as the goal, but still great

Really good concepts. It jumps between characters a but at the beginning and I found it more difficult to follow than having a single main character. But still really good. I'm definitely going to read this a few more times.

Changes the way of thinking projects

I read The Goal 20 years ago and always felt It might be applicable to projects. Very nice to finally see how.
The theory in the book is great. the chapters narrating PM classes are fantastic. the way It presents the theory is very good to follow.
some few chapters (describing Rick's relation with his wife) is kind of useless, but are quick.