Marek Kowalczyk

Business adviser, Change Agent, Consultant, Educator/Teacher, Entrepreneur, Idea generator, Project manager

Marek Kowalczyk is an expert in on time project management using Goldratt's Critical Chain Project Management. He participated in the largest IPO in Europe (the team of 2000 people, the value of $ 2 billion). Marek is an entrepreneur, a consultant, a publisher, and a visiting professor at several universities. He is Managing Partner of MANDARINE Project Partners and Partner in the publishing company MINT Books, specializing in books on Goldratt’s theory of constraints. Marek is also Academic Director of the Ernst & Young Academy of Business Program in Project Management the Project Management Program as well as Academic Director of the Post-Graduate Program in Project Management at the School of Banking in Wroclaw. He is a visiting professor at several MBA and project management programs, including ones at Warsaw University of Technology and Lazarski University. Marek studied at the Tokyo International College and State University of New York at Buffalo, and is a graduate of the Catholic University of Lublin (methodology of science and logic). He was a translator of business and science books. As an internal HR consultant in PTK Centertel (now Orange Poland), he managed the project to develop and implement a process-oriented human resource management system (winning the first place in the “Management Leader” competition in 2000). As a manager at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, he worked on the implementation of an internal project management system. Marek created MANDARINE Project Partners and MINT Books, in spite of many skeptics and cynics, to apply and promote effective, proven, common sense management practices of Goldratt’s theory of constraints, including the critical chain method, which he and his team successfully applied in companies, such as: - PGE Polish Energy Group - ITI Group - Zabka Polska - Laboratorium Kosmetyczne Dr Irena Eris Marek is a member of the Polish Association of Professional Speakers, and a certified member of the Theory of Constraints International Certification Organization. He was a member of the main panel of the National Program for the Development of Modern Materials Technology. He and his team were involved in managing the IPO of Polish Energy Group on the Warsaw Stock Exchange (the project involved about 2,000 people was completed in an impossible time of 7 months). According to Bloomberg, the project was the largest IPO in 2009 in Europe, worth $ 2 billion. In summer of 2010 Marek appeared at TEDxPoznan with the presentation "How to complete a project on time", available (in Polish) at https://vimeo.com/12737006

Making the Critical Chain project management method a standard way of managing complex, time-sensitive projects.

1. Projects are usually late, so managers set deadlines for individual tasks or milestones. 2. People in charge of tasks include safety buffers in their estimates of task completion times, which significantly inflates the planned project lead time. 3. There are several powerful mechanisms which cause task-level buffers to be wasted, which jeopardizes the project deadline. 4. Goldratt's Critical Chain method eliminates task deadlines, introduces central time buffers and offers a new approach to managing project execution. 5. Critical Chain has been successfully applied in many kinds of projects, resulting in 95% on-time delivery with project lead time reduction by up to 50%. 6. Having such a reliable project management method opens new possibilities for implementing ideas worth spreading.

Critical Chain, Project Management, theory of constraints

In 2010, I was a speaker at TEDxPoznań. The main idea of my presentation was: Ideas worth spreading are ideas worth implementing. I talked about Goldratt's Critical Chain Project Management as a way to make ambitious projects reality. After TEDxPoznań I decided to create a TEDx event dedicated to impossible projects. It became reality on Sept 20, 2012 as TEDxWSB 'Even Sky Is Not the Limit' — http://tedxwsb.pl

Creating mash-ups of ideas and inspiring people to implement them.