A Project Management Approach to Increasing Agency Margins Charlene Spoede Budd Marjorie Cooper ABSTRACT. Project management is a promising new managerial tech- nique to improve advertising agency productivity and performance. Al- though PERT/CPM is the most widely accepted project management approach, the Critical Chain technique developed by Eliyahu Goldratt overcomes the widely reported deficiencies of PERT/CPM. Using a hy- pothetical but realistic set of time estimates for tasks involved in creating an advertising campaign, Critical Chain was tested against PERT/CPM and was shown to reduce project duration by 20%. The authors present the rationale behind the Critical Chain approach and provide an over- view of how to schedule and manage a project using this new methodol- ogy. This article also discusses the benefits that an advertising agency can derive from using Critical Chain. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail ad- dress: <docdelivery@haworthpress.com> Website: <http://www.HaworthPress. com> © 2004 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.] KEYWORDS. Advertising, agency management, Critical Chain tech- nique, PERT/CMP, project management Charlene Spoede Budd (PhD, University of Texas; CPA, CMA, CFM) is Emerson O. Henke Chair of Accounting and Professor, Hankamer School of Business, Baylor University, P. O. Box 98002, Waco, TX 76798-8002 (E-mail: Charlene_Spoede@ baylor.edu). Marjorie Cooper (PhD, Texas A&M University) is Professor, Marketing Department, Hankamer School of Business, Baylor University, P. O. Box 98007, Waco, TX 76798-8007 (E-mail: Marjorie_Cooper@baylor.edu). Journal of Promotion Management, Vol. 11(1) 2004 Available online at http://www.haworthpress.com/web/JPM  2004 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1300/J057v11n01_03 29