Concerto Software for Critical Chain Project Management

In May 2012, Realization Technologies, Inc. in San Jose, CA received a $35.2 million firm-fixed-price contract to maintain, deploy, and sustain their Concerto software at existing sites. Corcerto is designed for managing multiple projects using Eli Goldratt’s critical chain method, which is derived from his Theory of Constraints (TOC). One of the likely outcomes for Concerto sites? Less multi-tasking, which isn’t productive. The other big change is the removal of added “safety time” per task, to be replaced with a project-level buffer. Beyond the individual project level, these 2 principles are combined by committing key resources to just one project at any given time, which has their entire focus for that specified block of time. Project scheduling is then managed around the availability of those resources. If you think that aspect sounds similar to the “bottleneck” principle at the core of TOC, you’d be right. Work location will be determined with each task order, with an estimated completion date of April 30/15. One bid was solicited, with one bid received. The U.S. Army Contracting Command, Alexandria, Va., is the contracting activity (W91WAW-12-D-0007).