TOC Thinkers

Q&A with Larry Leach - Q1

I am delighted to kick off a Q&A with Larry Leach, of Advance Projects, Inc. and author of Critical Chain Project Management and a long time virtual friend.  Larry is

Q1: Hey Larry, I've known you through the constraints management lists for about 10 years now, but we've never met.  I own two of your books - both of which I like, and one of which I refer to often; you've provided me with a huge amount of help over the years.  That said, I don't really know you!  Can you tell me a bit about yourself ... your TOC life and your non-TOC life?"

I’ll start with my non-TOC life. I live with my wonderful wife Christina and our GSD Tess in what most would call the mountains of Idaho, in the western U.S. (Idaho is in the Rocky Mountains, west of Montana, not to be confused with Iowa). We have three grown sons, all of whom completed college degrees, two with MBAs, who are making their way successfully in the world. One son is married, and in addition to adding his wonderful wife to our family has given us two grandsons, including eight month old Tommy, our joy. We enjoy all the outdoor activities Idaho has to offer, and are patiently (?) waiting for the next snowfall to hit the ski slopes again.

I have two Master’s Degrees, one in Mechanical Engineering, the other an MBA. I did project management in the nuclear reactor business for nearly 30 years before getting into TOC. Shortly after I started my own consulting practice, initially in the field of Total Quality Management (TQM), I had occasion to need something about production, and re-read The Goal. I had such a huge success with TOC “out of the box”, I decided to learn more. I became a Jonah, Jonah’s Jonah, MSW instructor, and of course critical chain instructor. 

Since most of my life was as a project manager, I focused on critical chain. I am a Project Management Professional (PMP). My unique take on critical chain is to synergize it with conventional project management, the Project Management Institute’s (PMI) Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) and other management ideas such as Lean and Six Sigma, together comprising Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM). During my early TOC years (1998-1999), I decided to write my first book, Critical Chain Project Management. The rest, as they say, is history.

Q&A with Larry Leach - Q2

Q2 - Larry, We had a few offline conversations about your new book earlier this year ...are you able to tell me a little more, now?"

I assume you mean the one not yet written, vs. Lean Project Management, which I published a couple of years ago. 

I plan to write a book sort of on the TOC Thinking Process, with the intent of improving its use. While I love the TP as it was initially defined and taught, I have been disappointed by its application, including my own use of it. Most who go through Jonah training never use the TP again, and even when they do, they rarely create breakthrough solutions of the kind Eli Goldratt was able to develop. Indeed, most of the few TP solutions I have seen presented did not get implemented, for one reason or another. While some may suggest that’s because none of us are geniuses like Eli (a fact for sure), I think we can do much better than we have so far. I think we can improve the process.

My objective is to make the process simpler and more likely to generate breakthrough solutions. I have been following the work of others in this direction, in particular Alan Barnard and Bill Dettmer, with his new book The Logical Thinking Process. I think they are on the same track, but have not yet reached the goal ;-). In particular, I think the TP must:

1. Address human behavior much more, including human thinking shortcomings,

2. Specifically find and work to fix wrong paradigms (including the tendency for more and more detail, e.g. 30-page CRTs), and which are often the leverage points for breakthrough solutions,

3. Exude the basic truth of TOC: simple solutions to complex problems.

4. Put the focus on doing, vs. thinking about it.

I haven’t set a schedule for it yet.

Q&A with Larry Leach - Q3

Q3  Larry, can you tell me what your proudest moment was while living in the "throughput world"?  It might be something big; it might be something small.

I still recall most fondly my first experience with TOC. (A comment comes to mind here, which I choose to suppress ;-)  I had just gone into consulting, and was seeking to sell my services in TQM- the predecessor to Six Sigma. My first client was the local newspaper, who had several quality issues, but the one that concerned them most was getting the paper out on time. They had been working for a year to get it printed on time, with no success. It seemed to get later and later. This was a big business problem for them, because if they did not get the newspapers moving to their distributors in time for the distributors to get them to customers, that days paper became waste, and their advertisers would threaten to not pay for the ads that did not get out on time.

I started applying the standard TQM tools (e.g. diagramming the process flow), but wasn’t satisfied with where that was going. They had been trying similar approaches for a year, with no success. Then, I remembered “The Goal”, which I had read some years before. It didn’t do much for me then, as I was managing large programs and projects, not production. But, this problem looked to me like production. I read it one night, and showed up early the next morning to watch the paper get made, looking for the constraint.

That afternoon, I told the publisher what I thought. He put the recommendation (to manage the constraint…by controlling input and using a buffer) into effect the next day. From that day forward, the paper went out on time every time. I still have the charts from 12 years ago, and to my knowledge, the paper still goes out on time every time.

Q&A with Larry Leach - Q4

Q4. I've got both editions of your CCPM book and - this may surprise you - I actually prefer the 1st edition, but I think the 2nd edition is the most useful!  I am very happy to have both though because I think they complement each other very well.  Can you tell us why you made such a radical rewrite of the 1st edition?  Is there any chance that owners of the 2nd edition can get hold of the 1st?

The simple answer isn’t probably what you’d hope: the publisher requires at least 30% change to publish a “2^nd edition”. A 2^nd edition is a publishing business decision, as it usually gives a sales pulse with relatively little effort (on the publishers part, anyway). I had five years further experience with real CCPM, and felt there were a number of  improvements needed. It is a much better technical product than the first edition.

Unfortunately, I had a better editor on the first edition than the second, and did not get to review a “to be published” version. As you know, I had to prepare a list of errata because of editing problems I found in the published version, and the publisher refused to reprint. Most of the concerns affect figures, where you cannot see the critical chain as well as I had intended. A few are just cosmetics; e.g. one chapter uses bullets for something, another does not. But, boo-hoo, I wanted it perfect!

You can only get the first edition used now. But, you can get my latest book “Lean Project Management”, in both electronic (my WEB site) and soft cover printed version (Amazon).

Q&A with Larry Leach - Q5

Q4: I've just ordered your new training DVD.  Can you tell us a little more about it?

I developed the training CDs as part of a United States Air Force contract aimed at delivering CCPM training throughout the entire Air Force. Believe it or not, $1,200,000 went into the three contracts involved in developing and testing it. It embodies what I do in my standard two-day LPM/CCCPM class, with changes necessary to the media. I think some of changes, such as knowledge testing, make it quite a bit more valuable than a single two-day class. So does the ability to work at your own pace, and go back over it whenever you wish. Its also MUCH less expensive than tuition for attending a two-day class, to say nothing of travel cost and the benefits of working on it when you want, where you want.

I hope you like it! Please be sure to fill out the feedback as you work through it.

Q&A with Larry Leach - Q3 - part 2

Larry:

I do have one other experience I’d like to add, because it is much larger, more recent, and CCPM.

I helped the U.S. Navy apply CCPM to a $200 million overhaul to the U.S.S. Boise at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard. Norfolk is a good shipyard, but not known for their prowess at this particular kind of boat, a 688-class submarine (Submarines are boats, not ships. Go figure.). The dry-dock record for this type of ship was held by Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, at 11 months. The best Norfolk had done prior was over 13 months. Norfolk completed the dry-dock phase with CCPM in 9 months (and well under budget, too)! I have a particularly good feeling about this, because my home is in Boise, Idaho…the city the boat is named after. They gave me a U.S.S. Boise hat, which I wear proudly when I am in town.  ;-)

Q&A with Larry Leach - Q6

Q6: So why have you changed from using the name CCPM to LPM?

When I coined the phrase “Critical Chain Project Management”, and its acronym CCPM (first presented at a PMI conference in 1998), my purpose was to show that critical chain is a synergistic improvement to the Project Management  Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), the International Standard for project management. When I published my first book, Critical Chain Project Management, in 2000, I devoted the second chapter to the synergy, and extended it to Total Quality Management. The second edition included Six Sigma. I think its really important to understand that Eli Goldratt and his book Critical Chain only focuses on a limited number of the necessary conditions for project success. In the late 90s, I read assertions that Critical Chain might “replace” the PMBOK. The assertions were always people who were clueless about the science of project management. They were good intentioned souls in their enthusiasm for TOC and critical chain, but ignorant of the management science.

The good news is that the acronym CCPM has made it to common use. The bad news is that most people think it means the same thing as critical chain.

For that reason, and to further extend the idea of synergy amongst all management approaches, I have begun to put  more emphasis on the ideas of lean thinking, and thus coined Lean Project Management (LPM) with the publication of my second book in 2005. Lean has been associated with production, not project management, so I think this is a valuable addition. I have had a number of clients who profit by looking at their process from both a production and a project management point of view.

I think there is much more yet to develop on the synergy between TOC and its siblings, such as critical chain, and all other management approaches. All have the same goal. When conflicts between approaches seem to arise, I consider them opportunities to learn.

I have empathy for the lack of insight of those who pose one approach “verses” another, as if one is right, and one is wrong. Their thinking is fundamentally flawed. They are like one of the six blind men who felt different elephant parts, and fiercely defend the part they felt as “right”; be it the leg (a tree), the trunk (a snake), the tail (a rope) etc. All are right from their perspective. All are also wrong due to their inability to see the whole.

Q7 - Q&A with Larry Leach

Larry, my final question (for now) is: When you look back at your experiences with TOC and it's cousins what is the one vital lesson you've picked up from TOC?

That one is easy in one sense, and hard in another. It is easy because it gave me such a huge "Ah-ha!" experience. I was returning to Idaho from hearing Eli Goldratt speak for three days in Colorado Springs. It finally sunk in the morning after, while driving through a Wyoming blizzard, ruminating on what he had said (Driving through a Wyoming blizzard is a world-class experience few enjoy, only achievable in a Detroit version four-wheel-drive pickup truck). I wrote a little article on it, which is still on my website...but hard to find: http://www.advanced-projects.com/TOC/Conflict.html

The article cannot convey the sense of awe the realization brought to me. The hard part is that I am pretty sure that describing it here will also fail to convey what it means to me, because it isn't something that can be put into words.

The realization was that there "are no real conflicts". There are only bad assumptions. When I read what I just wrote, it seems so inconsequential. It takes on deep meaning for me by conjuring up in my brain all of the pain and suffering humans cause in the world: all caused by bad assumptions.

In recent years, I have been studying the teachings of the man they call "The Buddha". His foundation of four truths is the same: humans cause all of their own suffering by their own thinking, and the consequent actions they take in response to their flawed thinking about reality. Goldratt's
enlightenment, although from a different way of thinking, was the same for me. The Buddha's eightfold path is the long road to enlightenment. Eli Goldratt has provided the world a powerful tool to help anyone who chooses that path.

I believe Eli Goldratt's greatest contribution to the world will be the idea of the "Evaporating Cloud" for resolving real-world (apparent) conflicts. The idea means the fundamental realization, the tool itself, and the processes for using it. People can realize its power if and only if they are able to embrace its deep meaning. To me, it is the "noble truth" of TOC.

Regards,
Larry Leach