Traditional project management practice expounds the project scheduling based on effort estimation against each individual project activity / task. The tasks are then sequenced based on the interdependencies between them and also based on the availability of resources. Most independent task appears first in the work book. In this approach a task cannot start unit either its parent task is complete or it is a super parent itself or until a resource is available to perform on it. Effort estimate that is used to plan the schedule for each activity usually aggregates both, the time to do the job itself and any safety buffers. Subsequently, start and end dates of each task is recorded in the plan and resource loading is performed to begin execution.

This approach, however, suffers from two important phenomena observed while project execution, called, Parkinson's and Murphy's laws. Parkinson's Law states that if the end date of a task in known beforehand, human psyche will usually tend to start it late and make a person work hard towards the end date. This causes the task to take the same amount of time that was estimated for it to finish, no matter, how much safety buffer was used. This is closely related to another effect called "student syndrome". The risk here is that, due to other urgent work that keeps coming suddenly from all directions, personal, official, social etc, the end date comes under tremendous pressure (due to the late start) causing deadline slippages, thereby, impacting final delivery date of the project.

Second one, i.e, Murphy's Law is the law of uncertainty in achieving any desired result. Of course it is not derived out of scientifically proven Heisenberg's principle but somehow the connection is felt. During the execution of a task there are always a few unknowns, which, when occur, cause delays of varied degrees.

Critical chain project management principles aim to prevent the two detrimental effects explained above. The effect of Parkinson's Law can be avoided if the end dates for the tasks are not published in the plan and the tasks are not allocated beforehand. Tasks are allocated when a person is known to be free and ready to dedicate fully. When people won't know the end dates, they will start on tasks when they feel most ready and since this project management technique does not depend on when tasks should start or end but only the final project end date, it provides for maximum immunization from Parkinson's effect. A free

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