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IND6132A — Session project · Team of 5 · Polytechnique Montréal

Planning a Student Party with Critical Chain & Lean Thinking

For our session project, our team of five chose to plan a real student party end-to-end — from booking the venue to wrapping up security at the end of the night — using Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM). CCPM grows out of the Theory of Constraints and shares lean's core instinct: find the bottleneck, protect it, and design the schedule around it instead of padding every task with hidden slack.

Critical Chain (CCPM)Theory of ConstraintsBuffer managementMS ProjectResource planning

Avec Olivier B., Béatrice D., Lucas R. & Francisca R. — Groupe 01, IND6132A, nov. 2023

How we planned the night

Step 1 of 5 — click a milestone to explore it

Defining the briefPhase 1

Set the budget and the cahier des charges for the night — what "done well" actually meant, from headcount and venue requirements down to the kind of experience we wanted to deliver.

Figure 1 — WBS for the night, broken down chronologically: study & prep, room transformation, and project management.
Figure 2 — AON Critical-Chain network showing task durations, dependencies, and float for the pre-event preparation chain.
Figure 3 — A 'fever chart' for tracking buffer consumption against critical-chain progress — the core CCPM monitoring tool.
Figure 4 — Resource utilization profile across the timeline, used to spot overloads on scarce people before they become bottlenecks.
Figure 5 — Layout sketch of the rented hall: stage, dance floor, bar, coat check, and reception.
Figure 6 — Buffer table: project buffer, resource buffers (RB1–RB3), and feeding buffers (FB1–FB4) with planned consumption thresholds.
Figure 7 — Network for the teardown phase: dismantling sound & lighting, cleaning the hall, handing back the keys, and the final project report.

Why Critical Chain instead of just Critical Path?

A classic critical path schedule assumes unlimited resources — but a student party doesn't have that luxury. The same handful of people are needed across multiple tasks. CCPM accounts for both task dependencies and resource dependencies, and instead of giving every task its own safety margin, it pools that protection into shared buffers placed where they actually matter.

Planning the night, phase by phase

We organized the work breakdown structure chronologically — by how the night actually unfolds — so anyone on the team could see at a glance what happens when:

  • Project definitionSetting the budget and the requirements for the night.
  • Pre-event preparationSourcing sponsors, suppliers, and the venue well ahead of time.
  • SetupTransforming the rented hall — bar, stage, dance floor, lighting, sound, coat check, ticketing.
  • Run of showEverything that keeps the night running smoothly: security, bar service, music, crowd flow.
  • TeardownDismantling and returning the venue to its owner in the agreed condition.

Mapping resources & consumables

We catalogued every renewable resource (security staff, volunteers, bartender, DJ, sound technician, custodial staff, cashier, even a car for deliveries) and every consumable (lighting, sound equipment, venue rental, drinks, tables, flyers, tickets). That distinction mattered: knowing which resources were reusable but scarce determines where the real constraint sits.

Designing against the three classic planning traps

A big part of CCPM's appeal is that it explicitly designs the schedule to counteract well-documented human behaviours that quietly inflate timelines:

  • Bad multitasking. Splitting key people across too many tasks at once — especially scarce resources like security or sound techs — slows everything down.
  • Student syndrome. The tendency to wait until a task becomes urgent before starting it, eating into the buffer meant to absorb real-world delays.
  • Parkinson's Law. Work expands to fill the time available — people pace themselves to use up an entire allotted duration rather than finishing early.

From theory to MS Project

I led the work of translating our AON Critical-Chain network into a working schedule inside Microsoft Project — configuring the resource pool, dependencies, and buffers so the tool reflected the same logic we'd built by hand. That meant reconciling the theory with the practical reality of how MS Project models tasks, durations, and resource leveling.

What this taught me

  • How to identify a project's real constraint — its "drum" resource — rather than just its longest path
  • Why pooling safety margins into shared buffers is often more honest and more effective than padding individual tasks
  • How human behaviour (procrastination, multitasking, pacing) is itself a planning variable, not just a risk to ignore
  • Translating a conceptual scheduling method into a real, working MS Project file that a team could actually run from

Why I think of this as "lean"

CCPM and lean both start from the same question: where is the waste, and what is actually limiting flow? Instead of adding buffer everywhere "just in case", CCPM asks you to find the one constraint that governs the whole system and protect that — which is the same instinct that drives lean process improvement in a factory or an operations team.

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