Lean Project Management in the Building and Construction Industry
What is Lean Project Management.
Imagine what your business would be like if everyone did what they said they were going to do. Variation in delivery, quality, cost and safety would be virtually eliminated. Your ability to plan and maintain control would be vastly improved and your customers would want to deal only with you. This is the kind of transformation that Lean has delivered in manufacturing businesses, why not construction businesses.
When boiled right down, a project is promise, delivered by people working in a network of commitments. The act of design creates the conditions of satisfaction that mark the delivery on that promise. During construction, the physical work, movement, and shaping and installation of materials delivers on promises made in planning as people organize to do their work. When people make reliable promises and do what they say, others in the network of commitments are free to make their promises resulting in predictable workflow downstream. When downstream planners can count on work being ready, crews can work closer together without sacrificing productivity. Project duration is reduced, productivity goes up across the board, and the site is safer.
A lean approach is achieved by involving project performers, people responsible for delivering on their promises, in planning the work that they will perform. It occurs through successive levels of planning starting from the overall promises to the client to weekly and daily planning where the details of what will be done by whom on a specific date is promised. The lean approach exploits what people learn as they perform. Planning continues throughout the project for refining, learning, innovating, and adjusting to the future that unfolds.
Lean Construction sees projects as temporary production systems and defines production as designing and making things. In other types of production systems, designing and making tend to get separated. The most extreme instance of this is repetitive manufacturing, the challenges of which have been the basis for production management theory and practice. We argue that the project is the fundamental form of production because even the products of repetitive manufacturing are designed and made the first time in a project, and because the result of separating designing and making is a decrease in value delivered to customers and an increase in waste during delivery. That separation of designing and making has unfortunately happened even in construction projects, partly as a result of increasing specialization. Simply put, Lean Construction is a way of delivering projects that integrates designing and making with the objective of generating value for customers and eliminating waste in the delivery of that value.
Construction as a manufacturing process:
The big lean ideal is to deliver projects while maximizing value and minimizing waste. An instrumental means is to simplify site installation to final assembly and commissioning. Projects as a whole are unique, but the components they assemble and the processes they use are very much the same. Consequently, shifting craft work into or towards manufacturing is a genuine opportunity to better achieve the lean ideal.
The Last Planner System
Last Planner is a management system developed by the Lean Construction Institute. It is defined by rules and consists of components, each with specific jobs to do. Its objective is production control; i.e., the reliable flow of work from one specialist to another, throughout project delivery. The primary measure of that reliability is Percent Plan Complete (PPC), the percentage of planned tasks actually completed in a production period.
PPC improves when commitments are made that have certain characteristics: definition, soundness, sequence and size. Since it is unlikely that we will ever be perfect planners, it is also necessary to track the reasons why commitments were not kept, so that root causes can be eliminated. In addition to making commitments and acting on reasons (learning), other components of the Last Planner system are lookahead planning and phase scheduling.
Phase schedules are produced by the team of people who will do the work in that phase of a project. Phases are typically defined in terms of the physical systems of facilities; e.g., substructure, superstructure, cladding, mechanical rough-in, and so on. Lookahead schedules are dropdowns of the phase schedule, looking ahead usually 3 to 6 weeks. Scheduled assignments are analysed for constraints that must be removed in order for that work to be committed when scheduled. The addition of these ‘make ready’ tasks increases the level of detail in the lookahead schedule as compared to the phase schedule. During the lookahead period, installation operations are designed with the trades workers who will do that work. These operations designs are then tested for capability to meet safety, quality, time and cost standards, using some combination of digital prototyping, physical mockups, and first run studies. Making work ready and defining how it will be done insures both that the work available for commitment in daily and weekly work plans is the right work in the right quantity, and also that the work will be done to requirements.
A general rule of lean implementation is to first stabilize a production system before trying to optimize it. In project production systems, stability is achieved through planning and control. The role of the Last Planner system is to provide production control within the Lean Project Delivery System. Hence, working at the level of projects, Last Planner is generally the place to start. It holds hands with work structuring, which-in various ways-specifies how work is broken apart and put back together again. Project schedules are the final output of work structuring, but it starts at forming the team and structuring supply systems.
So - Why do a project on a lean basis?
Underneath the simple answer, “It will cost less, get done earlier with far fewer injuries, and better quality,” there are better and more powerful answers. These include less suffering (there is that word again) for the customer and project team, greater accountability, forward-looking control – steering really – increased ability to cope with uncertainty and complexity, and the ability to identify and deliver more value to more people as the project unfolds. Such answers sound too good to be true, and they are too good to be true for those stuck in current practice.
Project Control
Control is redefined when the work in projects is understood as making and keeping commitments. By control, we mean the ability to make things happen as intended. Projects that look good on the cost and schedule report are not necessarily under control by this definition. Too often people choose and do work to make their accounts look good rather than keep their promise to deliver what is needed downstream. This sort of thing can be traced to a lack of accountability. Be clear about this: Accountability arises when a person makes a promise and accountability vanishes when they don’t have the freedom to say, “No.” Telling people to get their numbers up destroys accountability to others in the line of work.
New possibilities, beyond what we can explore in this short paper, open as the flow of work becomes more predictable. Perhaps the most important benefit predictable flow brings is close coordination in the midst of greater complexity. Nature knows this rule: predictability at the cellular level must increase as complexity increases or the organism cannot maintain its integrity.
The Future Is Uncertain
The primary reason to do projects on a lean basis is for the ability to adjust as the always uncertain and unknowable future unfolds. The usual approach, to do the majority of the planning and scheduling before the project begins, puts a straitjacket on the project team.
Things still go wrong on lean projects, but the ability of the team to work in trust together allows them to make the best of each circumstance. They can bring their collective creativity and talent to bear in ways unforeseeable in the initial program or master schedule.
Value is what the client says it is. Their understanding will change as the world changes and as new possibilities are brought forward. On lean projects, value is created and delivered when promising connects the work of specialists to the value delivered to the customer and coordinates their action. Greater value is delivered and customer satisfaction increased when the team adjusts to the changing situation and customer aims and interests.
Does Lean Construction work?
Lean Construction is being adopted widely in North and South America and northern Europe. Some of the more spectacular examples of its success are listed here.
• BMW Constructors, an U.S. industrial piping contractor, achieved a 31% increase in productivity on a refinery expansion project that the ‘experts’ said could not be delivered within the budget..
• Graña y Montero, a large Peruvian construction company, reports a 40% increase in project profitability after implementing Lean Construction.
• An architectural/engineering firm in Santiago, Chile reports a 31% increase in productivity.
• MTH, the largest Danish construction company, reports a 75% reduction in accidents on their Lean vs non-Lean projects.
How will it change the industry in the future?
There are trends in the Lean direction that are already well understood. Relationship contracting, increased use of BIM systems and reliance on suppliers and contractors to supply just in time with perfect fit-up are a few.
• There will be more involvement of downstream players in upstream processes, and vice-versa.
• There will various forms of alliances develop so bigger parts of the total project can be optimized; e.g., specialists will band together so that money can move across the boundaries of their organizations, thus removing an obstacle to innovation.
• Work will shift from on site to off site.
• More time and money will be spent on planning of all kinds.
• The general contractor role as financial go-between will be very much reduced.
• Builders will acquire design capability and designers will acquire building capability.
• Repeat customers will demand lean project delivery.
• The primary focus in lean itself will shift from waste elimination to value generation.
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Organisations we have worked with 
