A Different Approach to Project Delivery
John Draper, P.E., (Lean Project Consulting)
Lean Construction Team
Imagine participating in a football game
in which the game plan is developed by
the head coach and his assistants without regard to and perhaps before he even
chooses the players who will actually be
on the field. The individual players,
who may or may not have been on
a team together before, bring various levels of experience and skill to
the game but are generally proficient
in their individual specialties. During
the execution of the game, the sequence
of plays are determined by the coach and
sent into the game periodically. The purpose of the huddle is to make sure each
player understands what the next play will
be according to the game plan. When the
game happens to not go as planned, the
coach calls a time out and excoriates the
players to get with it and follow the game
plan and try harder to move the ball down
the field. Most, if not all of the players are
primarily focused on how well they execute
their role without much concern about the
highly collaborative. The Last Planner System, which is a key component of lean
construction, provides a means of making, keeping and monitoring a coherent
set of reliable promises and commitments
among the team during construction,
thereby enabling reliable workflow.
There are six essential elements that
make up the Last Planner System, all
of which work as an integrate whole to
create and maintain reliable workflow.
The focus of the system and within each of
the elements is on the doing – the thinking,
planning, conversations, etc. – rather than
on the documents produced by the doing –
the plan, schedule, etc.
Master Planning – The master planning conversation produces a high level
(with little detail) plan that breaks the project into large chucks of work, each with a
planned start and finish date. This is the
strategic road map that establishes the
promise of the project. Each chunk of work
in the plan is referred to as a “phase.”
When things don’t go as planned, we revert to finger
pointing, contract waving, and demands to
bring the project back in line with the game plan.
actual score of the game. The coach and
his staff, and of course the team owner,
are very concerned about the score.
This situation, amusing as it may be, is
readily seen to be a ridiculous way to plan
and play a football game. However, typically this is how we approach our construction projects. We delude ourselves
into believing that we can develop an effective game plan (schedule) in isolation and
all the individual players (trade contractors) need to do is execute their part of
the game plan. When things don’t go as
planned, we revert to finger pointing, contract waving, and demands to bring the
project back in line with the game plan. It
even gets worse. Sometimes we bring in
an expert game plan developer (scheduler)
who actually puts the plan together with little or no input from the coaches or players.
Our current conception of projects is at
odds with reality in several respects. We
attempt to simplify the world and model
it in our schedule. Because of this simplistic view of reality, we do not explicitly deal with possible alternative paths
that reality may follow. We assume that
our estimated durations are exact with
no inherent variation and that the project
will evolve exactly as our plan logic shows.
When the world doesn’t follow our model,
we attempt to force it to heed our well
thought-out plan. But as we discover time
and again, the world doesn’t listen and follows its own path.
The Last Planner® System
The Last Planner System is an alternative
approach to project delivery that is based
on the fact that the future is unpredictable.
Hence, this approach is dynamic and explicitly recognizes the inherent variation in the
individual tasks and provides a methodology for reducing it. Because projects are
not “engineered” assembly lines but “networks of commitments,” this approach is
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Phase Planning – The objective of these
sessions is to develop a detailed coordinated plan for accomplishing the specific
work of each phase. These plans are developed by the superintendents/foremen
of the trades involved in delivering that
phase, led by the project superintendent.
A technique referred to as “Pull Planning”
is used, in which the plan is created as a
series of requests starting from the end of
the phase and working back to the start.
At the conclusion of a pull planning session, the entire team has a single view of
how the phase is planned to be built and
has confidence in their ability to execute
the plan. Phase planning is done on an
as-needed basis in support of the overall
schedule objectives of the project.
Make-ready Planning – Just because
we have developed a realistic plan doesn’t
necessarily mean we will have success in
executing it. To give us more confidence in
our ability to do work on the project when
it is scheduled, we want to eliminate all
of the obstacles that may exist that could
hinder us in achieving that goal. The objective of make-ready planning is the identification and elimination of these obstacles,
which are called constraints, sufficiently
in advance of the scheduled work. Typically, a rolling 6-week look-ahead plan is
issued weekly that shows what is scheduled to happen on the project in the next
Huddling up to make adjustments to the
game plan.
six weeks. The trade contractors examine
the upcoming work to identify any constraints and then the project leadership
makes requests of, and receives reliable
promises from, those individuals responsible for removing the constraints.
Weekly Work Planning – Each week,
the trade contractors’ “Last Planners”
develop production plans detailing what
they are committing to accomplish on the
project the next week. These planning conversations occur in a group setting allowing each trade contractor and the team
as a whole to develop a coordinated and
coherent plan that prescribes the work
that is to be done next week in support of
the overall project goals.
Daily Coordination – Each day brief
“stand-up” huddles of key field personnel are
held towards the end of the shift at the workface to quickly report completions, make
any needed “course corrections” for tomorrow’s planned work, re-promise as necessary, get help from each other and record
plan variances and their reasons. This meeting serves as an autonomous controlling or
steering function that allows those closest
to the work to adjust to the always-changing circumstances of the project so they can
complete all of their promises.
Learning from Plan Variances – A key
feature of the Last Planner System is a
rapid feedback learning loop. Planning
variances manifested by weekly work plan
tasks not being completed as specified on
the plan are used as learning opportunities for the last planners to sharpen their
skills in make-ready and weekly work planning. The team develops the daily habit
of reflecting on the reasons for plan variances and developing and implementing
countermeasures to prevent similar plan
variances in the future.
The Last Planner System functions on
a repeatable weekly cycle incorporating
the last four of the above essential elements. A robust implementation requires
new behaviors on the part of the project
team and success in the implementation is
directly contingent to the degree in which
individual team members internalize the
new behaviors such that it now becomes
the way they approach their daily work.
This approach, which provides the basis
for big improvement, brings forth the necessary collaborative conversations among
the project team that are required for the
smooth and reliable accomplishment of
the work of the project. Once it is operating, waste can be driven from the project and the team can innovate and learn
rather than “fire-fight” over and over. Our
clients will receive all the value we promise... and then some.
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