Q2. Let's step back a decade or so. Tell me about your first book and why your wrote it. Can you tell us about the early days of Prochain?
I started working on Project Management in the Fast Lane just after leaving Bob Fox's organization, The TOC Center, in 1996. At that time I wanted to build a business around critical chain concepts and software, so working on the book forced me to think through the ramifications even as I developed the initial version of the ProChain software. It also gave us some credibility as ProChain moved ahead, and helped promote more discussion and awareness of critical chain concepts. I don't think the mechanics of critical chain scheduling have changed much since then. What's really changed is our level of awareness regarding what's most important and how it all fits together. People in the TOC community (yes, including sometimes ProChain) have spent too much time obsessing about unimportant technical details and not enough time figuring out how to make implementations work over the long haul.
In late 1996, in order to fit with the release of his book "Critical Chain," Eli Goldratt convened a group of people whom he hoped would develop software to support the concepts described in the book. The group included a number of companies, including myself, Primavera, Baan, ThruPut Technologies, the Goldratt Institute, and Synergy, a company based in Washington, D.C.
Bill Lynch was the main Synergy representative, and I had known him for a number of years through his work on Lean Logistics in the U.S. Air Force. We decided we could do better by teaming up, which is what we did in 1997.
