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Andy Jordan writes about the easy stuff, the hard stuff and the forgotten stuff about Project Management in his article Project Manager vs. Project Leader. He first describes leadership then discusses motivating the team (the easy stuff), not overburdening the team (the hard stuff) and developing the capability of the team (the forgotten stuff).

I can’t agree more. A manager, by definition, controls the activities to get something done. Every project manager adopts a leadership role, but the focus and drive of the PM is about controlling activities, not leadership.

This makes for a problem when the project is so complex that one guy cannot manage all the activities. Non-senior people become disheartened when their authority is undermined or they feel like they don’t see the big picture. (ever hear of a complaint about lack of communication?)

An elegance comes with established processes. The leader can then manage to the process, rather than the activities themselves. This puts people in charge and holds them accountable for results. The popular process is, of course, the Last Planner® System. But any type of checklist or instruction set can accomplish the same idea.

So set up a process and hold people to it. It is a great way to re-establish trust with your team and increase performance in what matters.

I was in a class at my gym the other day. This particular class is one that I have gone to many times. I knew the routine and the instruction. A couple of my good friends also regularly attend. Now, exercise can be a personal choice and a personal experience, but learning the routine and doing it right are very important. We all hear different things in class and all are at different stages of our practice. But we are all students and all want to get better.

So, during this particular class the instructor came over to provide a correction to one of my friends. It was a slight correction, but made all the difference in the benefit of the exercise. It was a correction that I had received a while ago and knew very well of the importance of this particular aspect.

But my friend was still suffering from the same mistake that I had been making before getting corrected. I wonder why my friends and I don’t get together to talk about the routine and practice together to improve.

It is exercise and they are my friends so I won’t push. But we don’t always have that luxury. Particularly when we are at work and have work to do. It should be our job to watch each other and get together to improve each other’s work. This is called peer coaching. There isn’t one person that is better than the rest and is the instructor. You simply get together to practice and each offer your differing perspectives. Then everyone learns together. Not all opinions will fall into line, but things will happen much faster than when we wait for the instructor to come correct us.

Is Quick and Easy Kaizen a way to establish a habit of identifying hazards?

It seems like every time I walk on a jobsite I see a worker without proper PPE, or some obstacle on the floor, or sharp metal objects stacked up. I know other people notice these things, yet nothing is done. There is not an established habit in everyone of making and sharing improvements. The responsibility lies with the management and the safety professionals.

In 2002 a group of thought leaders wrote about how improvements to safety had reached a plateau. They went on to define a hazard as a condition that will harm a worker unless the worker is able to detect and avoid it. One of the researchers went on to write about work teams that consisted of family members and how they were accustomed to telling each other about the hazards on the job. This was in contrast to hierarchical teams where people didn’t speak up as much.

Quick and Easy Kaizen is a habit of making improvements and sharing them. I wonder if establishing this habit on our construction projects would break down some of the barriers to letting each other know about hazards.

I would like to thank the two gentlemen, JunWoo Park and Will Hutchens who are  working with Norman Bodek and met with me yesterday for coffee. This connection was born of a conversation with them.

A webcrawler just pointed me to an image of the learning cycle, PDCA (plan do check adjust). (http://bit.ly/d8KoYE). There is an astrix with “Start Here” next to the Check. Funny, I thought. Usually I plan first. But it makes sense to first check to see if there is a need to take action. Usually I have in mind to make a plan first without getting clear why.

What are you doing without a clearly defined goal?

The new contract affiliated with Lean Construction has been garnering a lot of talk. When I mention the Integrated Form of Agreement (IFOA) or Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) at industry sponsored cocktail parties I usually get some level of interest and a lot of confusion from people. Engineering News Record (ENR), a popular construction related newsmagazine just published a fact finding review of the new contract type that I want to put your attention on.

The article demystifies some erroneous thoughts on the contract, and points out some relevant criticism. Many with experience are quoted with good remarks.

One comment was of particular interest. A critic of the new contract type pointed out that with a robust process trust among the players would materialize. This is in criticism to the contract language that specifies collaborative behavior. The old chicken or the egg argument. But we do know that we’ll get the same results without change.

This is a short paper that Hal Macomber and I put together to contrast Lean and Six Sigma in Project-Based Organizations.

Lean and Six Sigma are generally understood as improvement approaches. Both can be comprehensive approaches for managing the organization. Lean is about focusing on what is valuable to the customer – all else is considered waste. Six Sigma is about improving quality through reducing process variation. Both approaches use some variation of Walter A. Shewhart’s Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) approach for putting the scientific method into everyday use. A blend of Lean and Six Sigma is becoming the norm for modern process-based companies.

Organizations that have ongoing operations (healthcare, manufacturing, services) have a pre–existing way they do their work. Planning how to do the work every time the work is done is not essential because of the repeated flow, assembly line, or standard operating procedures that are re-used. For process-based work, the work advances either on the arrival of material (push system) or the replenishment of material (pull system). The organization in process-based situations is rather stable. People tend to work with the same people most of the time.

Organizations that do one-off production or do projects (design, construction, large procurements, information technology implementations) start their work by designing the production system. They do this in planning conversations. The best practice for doing that planning directly involves the people who will be performing the work of the project. Work advances in projects through commitment-making by the performers of the tasks. The project organization is created new for each project. People often don’t know each other or have limited contact with each other up to the start of the project. Once the performers have accomplished their tasks they often leave the group. Eventually, the whole team typically disbands and moves onto other projects.

Unlike process-based work, planning must continue on projects in anticipation and in response to the changing conditions as the project unfolds. Planning is an essential aspect of successful projects. Lean Project Delivery starts with an emphasis on improving planning. This is akin to the Six Sigma focus on stabilizing process capability (Cpk) using statistical process control. Once we are able to complete what we set out to do when we set out to do it, then we are in a position to bring the general improvement practices to both projects and processes.  Lean Project Delivery incorporates methods uniquely suited to the project setting.

•    conditions of satisfaction (customer value)
•    network of commitments (value streams)
•    paced production (continuous flow)
•    right-to-left scheduling (pull principle)
•    on-going retrospectives and continuous improvements (pursuit of perfection).

There are no Six Sigma methods or tools that are available to address those concerns.

The risk of overlooking this constant re-establishing of the production system is attempting to fit a project into a predefined set of production system tools. We might say “do it like the last project” or attempt to map the flow of a project, only to find infinite variations and differing needs during the next project. The result contains unconsidered waste.

Lean is becoming a dominant model for project design and delivery, as well as internal operations. Lean is mentioned alongside Building Information Management, and the Integrated Form of Agreement. The stories multiply and knowledge of lean spreads throughout the built environment.

During this expansion, I believe the story of Lean Construction has been mostly lost. Below is a Wordle.net image of the terms from a popular forum on Lean Construction. The bigger words appear most often in the website. It is hard to tell what the main idea of lean is from this.

Generally, people believe that Lean Construction came from applying ideas from the manufacturing industry to construction. While learning from other industries is very important, lean construction was born unto itself. Only some years after the focus on planning was discovered the founders saw the parallel to the manufacturing industry and adopted the name Lean.

And so Lean has a heart in planning. This was discovered when productivity improvement stopped helping. Planning moves work through the construction system. It is the “conveyor belt” to construction projects. Planning makes up the production system. Planning is done by people in conversations consisting of promises and requests. Trust matters. A practice of learning from anomalies, variances, issues and problems is critical. 

The manufacturing tools (value stream maps, 5S, waste walks, etc) have a place in improving construction, but are only useful after the project is stabilized.

How do you describe lean construction?

My father has been bringing an audio recorder around his mother, my grandma, for some time now. She isn’t doing well and he wants to capture some of her stories before the grand old book closes.

Projects can be like that too if we don’t capture and train the best methods. In 1940s, the U.S. Government created a way to do this called Job Instruction (JI). To increase industrial production, the war machine utilized an unfamiliar workforce, women. Seventy years later, the Job Instruction program has proven successes in projects as diverse as construction, auto manufacturing and hospitals. It is an unqualified success.

Job Instruction is one leg of continuous improvement. By creating a baseline to train workers, you create a launching point for continuous improvement. My firm has used JI to standardize how we:

• launch new projects
• write reports
• use video conferencing software
• follow up with new clients
• document meetings
• facilitate book clubs

For many success stories visit http://twi-institute.com/. The initial training for your front-line supervisors is 10 hours – 2 hours a day over 5 days. Contact this author or the TWI institute for an instructor near you.