One thing led to another, the CPR team was trained in CBA, other colleagues got exposure to CBA at the LCI Design Forum and then we held a CBA Sound Decisionmaking class for our staff and some of our clients. Jim Suhr, founder of the CBA system, was our instructor. I couldn’t attend, but my youngest son who had just graduated from college attended. When he returned his mother asked, “How was the training?” He answered, “It changed my life.” Well that statement changed my life.

I have completed 16 days of training in all of the CBA public courses plus a special Master Class that three colleagues and I attended with clients Jeff Loeb and Jeff Murray from CH2M Hill, Alan Mossman and John Koga. We are now introducing all our clients to sound decisionmaking the CBA way. While CBA has been very useful in the design of buildings, we’re seeing great results throughout the design and construction process.

You can learn about CBA at this year’s Lean Construction Congress in Pasadena. My colleagues and others in the CBA Master Class are putting on a one-day sound decisionmaking class on the day before the Congress. Enroll in the CBA session along with the balance of the Congress. In addition to the class materials, attendees will get Jim Suhr’s two short books Sound Decisionmaking the first & second essentials.

It might change your life too!

One of the keys to success in designing a production system based on lean principles is to get all of the work experts who are supervising the work, we call them last planners, to engage with each other to collaboratively work out a plan for the phase that includes the best of the alternatives available to them. Facilitating that conversation can be a challenge if you aren’t starting out with the right question. What question?

How will we do our work to meet the client (or project) milestone?

Looks simple. Let’s break it into its parts.

we

“We” is a specific group of people who are managing the work of others. “We” is not any trade foreman or design lead, nor is it the supervisor’s supervisor. It is the person who will show up everyday with his/her workers who will perform the work in that phase.

You cannot substitute people in this planning conversation. You need the people who know the staff and what that staff is good at doing and what they are not good at doing. It is only with deep knowledge of the people that a last planner can engage with others in evaluating alternative approaches to choose an approach with the greatest advantages for all the trades in that phase.

“We” is also a collective of last planners. Change out one last planner for another and the resulting plan will likely be different.

our work

What is it that “we” are doing? Starting with a particular discipline, the last planner has to know the scope of work in the phase. There’s no showing up to a pull planning meeting without having studied the work of the phase. It won’t do. Last planners must know the scope, the materials, the hours planned for the work and the equipment or information that is available to them or that is needed. But it doesn’t end there.

“Our work” also means the work that others will be doing. Why? Because completing the work of one trade creates the conditions for beginning the work of other trades. Last planners need to understand what the starting conditions are for their work. This allows them to make requests and negotiate hand-offs during the pull planning conversation.

meet the milestone

We can’t know what work we have to do without understanding what has been promised to be in place. Sometimes this comes from an explicit promise to a client. Other times the milestone definition is established by the project team for managing the project. In both cases, we can describe the milestone as a set of conditions that must be satisfied for successful completion.

Last planners must understand the conditions of satisfaction (COS) to do a good job in the planning of the work in the phase. And, that is not enough. Why are those COS important to the job? One answer to that is the completion of every milestone sets the stage for doing something different in the next phase. Knowing what is to come next and why it is important to the client or the project creates the context for pull planning in the phase.

That wasn’t difficult. Add these items to your pull planning preparation checklist:

• Invite the people who will be the last planners
• Share the conditions of satisfaction for the milestone with all the last planners
• Brief the whole group on all the work going on in the phase
• Have each last planner study their scopes

Remember, don’t let people lose sight of their role in pull planning. Throughout your pull planning sessions remind the last planners they are there to answer the pull planning question.

The purpose of pull planning is to design a project-based production system in conformance with lean principles. Like all aspects of Last Planner, it is a collaborative approach that includes those who are directly responsible for supervising the work on the project. People mistake merely scheduling a phase of work from the end working backwards for the intent of pull planning.

Another problem I see is that people are focused on the wrong things. Some people take great care in getting all the data elements on a sticky note. But you have to use the correct data and use that data correctly. Just the other day I saw a series of stickies with “activities” versus “conditions of satisfaction” (COS) and “durations” rather than “concentrated effort”. These are major mistakes in understanding. People can’t do the work of designing a lean production system without the correct data. Some people say why does this matter? I can explain.

Let’s say that we want to bake a pie. The recipe for the crust calls for a 1/4 cup of white chrystalized granules, a cup of white powder and a stick of white sticky stuff. Is this an adequate description of ingredients for making pie crust? Do we use sugar or salt? Do we add powdered sugar, flour, baking soda, baking powder or corn starch? Do we mix them with lard, vegetable shortening or marshmallow fluff?

Vocabulary matters because the distinctions we make in language matter to the actions we will take. Substituting the word “activity” for “conditions of satisfaction” puts the attention on the action rather than on the outcome. One of the keys to the design of the production system is clear conditions for handing the work off from one performer to the other. We call those “conditions of satisfaction,” not “activities.” Similarly, we want to know the concentrated effort to fulfill the conditions of satsifaction which is the elapsed time to perform for specific people who are performing, e.g., 10 hours for 1 licensed mechanic and 1 apprentice. The team needs this information so they can adjust crew sizes and batch sizes across the whole project to design for flow.

You won’t get pie crust from adding any three white things together just like you won’t get a lean project by working only with activities, durations and scheduling backwards. To borrow a principle from Choosing By Advantages Decisionmaking, you must learn and skillfully use the pull planning method to create flow on your project.

There is more to pull planning than I can cover in this blog post. Look for other lessons in the Pull Planning Primer series.

“I could feel the chairs moving away from me,” Fields recently recalled. “At Ford, in the past, if you delivered bad news, it wasn’t good for your mojo.”

The “old Ford” would create thick reports that would hide the problems a business unit was having. The new Ford puts their problems on the table for others to provide help.

Neither Ford nor Mullaly invented the problems-first approach. Credit has to go to Toyota. As Ralph Keller, President of the Association of Manufacturing Excellence says, “Don’t Allow Problems to Be Hidden; They’re Jewels.” Jewels? Really? You bet! Problems — variances to our expectations — are the opportunity to learn and start a cycle of improvement.

The challenge is not problem-solving. Toyota claims that over 80% of all their improvements start and finish with a Good 5-Why™. When people recognize and investigate variances they inevitably improve the situation.

The challenge is in announcing problems. In the design and construction industry, we deal with problems as we encounter them fixing and “making do” without fan-fare. Most problems are never reported. For all kinds of reasons, reporting problems is seen as job-limiting.

What can leaders do? We must set good examples to celebrate problem discovery, problem announcement and problem learning. Getting involved with learning from variances is one of the most important things a leader can do. It shows a respect for people and leads directly to continuous improvement.

What problems will you announce today?

Adopting new tools and using some of the old tools with a new emphasis is part of the process for transforming the way we deliver design and construction services. However, we must place our emphasis on the tool users rather than the tools themselves.

Toyota’s two pillars are “respect for people” and “continuous improvement.” But I see far too many firms and project teams focusing on using Last Planner® System without putting the pillars first. The same goes for all the attention given to kaizen blitzes/events/workshops. A few “experts” lead a week-long event that while it improves an underperforming process it doesn’t leave the organization with the new employee capability. Now don’t get me wrong, if a group is unable to improve their own processes, then for sure bring in experts to help. We’ve done a lot of that work in the last 10 years. However, we do it in a way that builds capability.

It will take you longer to improve the process while investing in staff. But that is one of the keys to “Real Lean”, as Emiliani says. Going slow to start will allow you to go fast later on.

So you might think, “What happens next? What about improving reliability to 80%? 85%? 90%?” Continuous improvement is one of the two pillars of lean. However, most teams are not continuously improving reliability. Why? We don’t know for sure. We speculate that the initial performance improvement is so much better than anyone has seen before that they get complacent.

But not all teams and construction firms are like that. We know of one west coast company that routinely runs high reliability projects. How do they do it? They embrace both lean pillars — respect for people and continuous improvement. It happens in the way that project supervision interacts with the specialty contractor foremen. Rather than emphasizing the technical aspects of the project, project supervision shows up as mentors and coaches to the last planners (foremen). This shift from being the boss to being the coach allows teams to continue improving reliabilty.

Who’s in the mood to mentor foremen?

A few years back, I was part of a leadership team that put together quarterly presentations for the executives. One of the sections we had to prepare was titled “reflections.” As a team, this was the only time that we would reflect on how we got where we were. Except most of us really didn’t reflect. One person on the team would take responsibility for preparing our “reflections.” When we presented, it was really just that one person’s reflection on the past quarter.

The first reason I smile is because the vision that comes to my mind is one of my dear colleagues would break out in his best Diana Ross impersonation singing “Reflections of, the way life used to be.” Even though he did this a dozen or so times before each quarterly meeting, it never failed to bring laughter about the team.

The second reason I smile is a little more reflective (if you will). As the years moved on and I began to learn about lean, the idea that our team only took the time to reflect four times a year (and in the fashion we did) seems ignorantly arrogant and quite foolish.

It’s also a gentle reminder that I can still be ignorantly arrogant and quite foolish when I forget to reflect as often as I should.

I was reviewing Quick n’ Easy Kaizens with a small group of three accountants a few months back. Something really interesting happened. The situation starts with one of the accountants sharing her QnEK of posting the 5 most commonly used expense codes right on her cubical wall. People were constantly coming up to her to ask her for them – interrupting her work or causing them to wait if she was on the phone or away from her desk.

The interesting thing to me was that it wasn’t until she shared her improvement with the others that they even realized this was a situation that had opportunity for improvement. The group talked discussed her improvement, and other improvements they could make to the situation. One of them suggested emailing those 5 common codes around to everyone that used them. This was good in the sense that the three of them were talking, and building off of each other. After a few minutes of discussion, the third person in the group very excitedly shared that those codes could go right on the expense reports. This would completely eliminate the need for anyone to look up the codes because they are right there, where the work happens.

I think this situation represents some of the hidden beauties of a good QnEK program. When people get in the mood of improving together, their ideas bounce off each other and grow from each other. If these three people didn’t communicate about the situation and the improvements, minimal improvements would have been made. Not only did the accounting department end up with more correct expense reports to process, but they were able to eliminate unnecessary movement, prevent defects and reduce waiting for many others.

When my husband came home, I was very excited to share my improvement with him. I was a little taken aback when he responded by suggesting that we separate the spices in the trays by the ones we use most often or alphabetically. It made perfect sense! Why hadn’t I thought of that? I was not very accustomed to somebody else making improvements to my improvements!

We wound up alphabetizing the spices. I quickly began to appreciate his idea built on mine. It is so much better to have multiple minds working to improve things. What one mind thinks of can be very different than what another mind thinks. The impact of the improvements built together is always much better than one!

I often hear people say, “The only thing we can do now is (fill in the blank).” Really? The ONLY thing? I like having a little fun when I hear that. I quickly ask someone else, “Is there something you can think of that we could do?” Invariably, one or more people come up with good alternative actions. Often, much better than the “only solution.”

There are a few things at work when people offer “only-solutions”. First, they lock-on early to their view of the situation (world). Second, they skip the most important step in any decision process. Third, they are stuck with few thinking patterns. Let’s take them one at a time.

Locking on to one view of the world is quite easy to do. For most of us, we only have the view we have. That’s why in any serious decision situation we will usually do better if we engage others in our decision process. This brings different perspectives (view), experiences and knowledge. All can enhance decision-making.

There is a tautology about making sound decisions. You can’t choose the best althernative if the best alternative wasn’t considered in the first place. The second phase of the Choosing By Advantages (CBA) Decisionmaking System for sound decisions is to innovate alternatives. We don’t have the habit of generating a multitude of alternatives in the see-problem, fix-problem world of construction. Consequently, we are not getting the best decisions.

Design and construction call for both practical patterns and the mingling of patterns in novel ways. “If this, then that” is a practical pattern that fits prior experience to a recognizable situation. “Try something, learn something” is a pattern for dealing with ambiguous circumstances. By combining thinking patterns we can gain a richer appreciation of the decision situations we face.

Fred White closes his article with a pattern for the business environment, one that fits will in design and construction: “There is no one right answer.” To that CBA practitioners would add, there are “only” sound, congruent and effective decisions.