The critical path to optimizing business.

How would you like to become a minimum of 20% more efficient than you are now?  How about 20% more effective?  Almost any organization can, with surprisingly little effort.  This can be achieved by employing a management technique known as critical path management, or CPM.

First, let us define some terms so we know we are all talking about the same thing. 

The first term I want to define is a project.  A project is a series of tasks some of which may be done serially and some of which may be done in parallel.  Projects have a defined beginning and end.  Building a new office building and launching a new product our projects.  They start. You do some stuff in the middle.   They end.  Then, normal business takes over

The second term I want to define is a process.  A process is a business activity that is continuously performed.  For example accounting and manufacturing are processes.  Let’s take accounting as an example.  You close the books monthly, 12 times a year.  You create quarterly financial statements every three months, after closing the books.  Finally, you create an annual report yearly.  Then you start all over again, continuously.  In auto manufacturing, you build an engine, build a body, build the axles, assemble the automobile, ship it out of the factory, and then start all over again on the next automobile.  Actually, they start each new automobile after the previous one is started, even before it is finished.

Now notice something.  A process, whether accounting or auto manufacturing, is a series of discrete projects repeated over and over in succession.  Another way to say it is that a sub-process a standalone component of a process is, in fact, a project.  Optimizing the effectiveness of the component sub-processes, aka projects, has the overall effect of optimizing the entire business process.