Last week Cascadia hosted the Principal Planner for the city of Portland, Oregon. Apparently, we are working within a comprehensive plan that was created in the year that Mt. St. Helen's erupted. Time to re-plan.

The system is nearly unbearably confusing and the proposed changes are immense. 22 public organizations are involved. The redesigned system holds 9 action areas which break away from traditional functional boundaries of existing departments.

It seems similar to a new construction project! How are they going to manage such a complex project? Like a construction project, they've got an innovative vision, but are missing opportunities partnering with private companies because they don't know how to reach out. With input, it seems the Principal Planner is writing the script. I wonder just how much support he really has from the stakeholders…

In a recent post, Mark Graban calls healthcare owners to action in three ways [verbatim]:

• Design your process BEFORE you design your space
• Analyze the existing process and layout to understand the waste and problems, so you can incorporate those lessons into new space
• Take control of your design process – don’t abdicate responsibility to the architects. Work with them, but realize it’s YOUR space that you have to live with for years after construction

He is telling us that it is up to project owner's to be a good customer. How? to do that is the question. (perhaps the wrong question). There is a Lean way to manage design. It is called Responsibility Based Project Delivery™ ( RbPD).

Within RbPD, roles are redefined; the voice of the customer is maintained by the Chief Designer™, as is the  client's target budget value. He or she can pull in all needed parties to assist with decision making. In addition this person prioritizes the work of the design team to meet the needs of all internal and external process customers.

This design process, preceded with operational design of the healthcare processes will make for an outstanding facility that provides the flexibility that clinical staff will need over time and for the current needs.

Hello,

I am doing a 2 minute survey on surveymonkey.com to understand better what your questions are. I've been making offers to come to your office for an hour to present and discuss Lean. With your help I would like to better focus and prepare. Please take a minute in the survey HERE (http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/5VFTGWX) to tell me who you are and what questions you have. I'll publish the results here on my blog. All is anonymous. 

Thanks,
Matt

Construction, like healthcare, is learning from another industry. I was just watching David Fillingham, Chief Executive, Royal Bolton Hospital NHS Trust give his speech on Managing the Lean Hospital: what it takes to engage the whole hospital for the Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit 2009. In this he has four points on how to convert the skeptics that I thought fit very nicely to our industry (construction):

• Rigorous use of lean methods
• Convincing data
• Hands on experience
• Reinforce through changed management system and leadership style.

So, in my own words this means that we need to:

• Adopt some tools and not to deviate from them. Make a concerted effort to use the Last Planner® System, A3 Learning, and a Visual Management System like Toyota's Safety-Quality-Deliverable-Cost-Morale work cell management boards.
• Find success stories and share them. Celebrate and publish all the wins. Go to www.leanconstruction.org and share a new presentation with your team once per week. 
• Get into action early and reflect on the learning. Experiment! When is it the right time to change anyway?
• And finally, change at the top. Leadership needs to be fully engaged. The Project Executive needs to be very well versed in Standard Work and all the tools that are being adopted so that they can coach the practice.

There is a training principle adhered to by most distance runners that states that each workout needs to have a purpose or objective.  Are you going to work on endurance, speed, hills, etc?  Just going out and running without a purpose is known as running "junk" miles, which does nothing to make you a better runner and could lead to injury.

So, on your LPS project, are you "running junk miles"?  Are you going through the motions of the LPS without really having a purpose?  After you are proficient with the mechanics of the LPS, you should focus on an improvement objective each week.  According to Geoff Colvin in his book Talent Is Overrated, high performance is a result of "deliberate practice" and not a result of just plain hard work or innate talent.  The special kind of hard work that Colvin describes is focused on an objective and is repeated with discipline until you get it right or obtain the improvement that you were seeking.  It is not fun and usually "hurts."

If you really want to improve, stop running "junk miles" and institute a discipline of "deliberate practice" on your project.

Manufacturers, inspired by Toyota as a role model, have learned to take customer satisfaction seriously.  In businesses such as construction, where each product is custom-made, the practice of negotiation to understand the customer's conditions of satisfaction has also achieved its rightful level of importance. 

In manufacturing, a single process is used to make a large number of products.  The process is designed and then can be improved incrementally as the participants contribute their ideas for kaizen. 

In construction, a one-time process is used to make a single complex product.  The product is usually so complex that the process can't be understood and fully designed in advance.  The Last Planner ® System offers the possibility of continuously negotiating the process by which the product will be built through the discipline of planning.

One of the precepts of lean manufacturing is the reduction of batch size as a means to control overproduction.   Since the concept of "overproduction" on a construction project is more difficult to grasp we tend not to pay a lot of attention to batch sizes.  This neglect can result in less than efficient production and even worse.  By batch size, I am referring to the amount of "work-in-place" that is released to the next trade. 

Here is an example from a multi-unit residential project to illustrate the point.  This project consisted of several multi-story buildings.  Each floor was framed-out with metal studs and gypsum wallboard.  As typical, the metal framer went through each floor erecting the metal studs, with the plumber and electrician following a floor or so behind with their rough installation.  As part of his installation, the plumber installed prefabricated shower units in pre-framed alcoves.  However, when he installed the shower nozzle piping, he had to do so off-center in the shower because a double wall stud assembly had been constructed dead-center behind the shower enclosure.  Since, no one was paying attention to batch sizing and the framer was ahead of the shower installation crews by several floors when this issue was discovered, instead of one or two off-centered shower heads, now there were several hundred.  If the framer had not "overproduced" framed walls and gotten so far ahead of the plumber, only one or two framed walls would have had to be changed for proper installation of the shower head and the stud layout could have been adjusted on all future walls.

The reliable workflow that results from the disciplined use of the Last Planner® System allows the project team to closely coordinate their work on the project which in turn provides the opportunity for the reduction of batch sizes.  On such a project, there would be no advantage and only disadvantages for having the framer more than a couple of days ahead of the plumber.

Multitasking seems to be a pretty valuable characteristic in a person lately. People put this alongside “great people person” and “good computer skills” on their resume. Not dropping details is one of the most important things that we can do to keep our projects from failing. That being said, I would like to show you that multitasking can hurt a project too. 

There are many reasons to multitask. What typically happens is that we get started only to find out that the work is actually not ready and we need to stop again. Before long we have 15 or so open items that are all somewhere between started and finished. None ready to be handed over to the next person, and only few that are available to make progress on. Think about your billing cycles, todo lists around the house, administrative coordination, and especially the specialty contractor doing part of the total job. The best situation is where there is enough work that is being released that productivity won’t be too bad. 

Just witnessed yesterday one of the best weekly subcontractors meetings I've ever attended.  50 minutes to cover the agenda. The meeting started by reviewing the Plus/Delta from the previous meeting (5 minutes) then Safety and House keeping (5 minutes) and review of PPC (88%) and Variances for the current week (5 minutes). After this they reviewed the Make Work Ready Plan starting from week 6 then working their way backwards to week 1 (10 Minutes). As I expected the majority of the time was spent coordinating next week work. There were 22 different subcontractors in the meeting; this means that they went over 22 WWP's in only 20 minutes.

The superintended finished up with a Plus/Delta (5 minutes) and adjourned the meeting by thanking everyone for their participation, preparedness and for being on time.

Plus:

I have written before about the importance of make-ready planning in creating and maintaining reliable workflow on a project and establishing the discipline of setting aside a block of time each week to actually do this planning.  But how do you actually go about making work ready?  Do you follow a detailed procedure or do you just "think" about the upcoming work in your head.

Just as a pilot who has landed a plane 1000 times will use one on the 1001^st and each succeeding landing, proficient last planners will not leave make-ready planning to chance but will use a set procedure and checklist to guide them in this critical effort.  What sorts of things should the last planner be doing in order to make work ready?  First, although make-ready planning is largely a "mental activity" one should put pencil to paper in a manner akin to how we use these items in solving complex math problems.  Next, develop and follow a set procedure for doing make-ready planning.  Here is a starting point:

Week 6