Running on Rails: Two Kinds of Action
October 20th, 2002 by HalI had the pleasure of visiting a construction site last week in Milwaukee. It is a good sized project — over $100 million — to add on to a hospital. The construction site was well-organized. People were quite busy and working cooperatively. The project is approaching the two-year mark — on time and on budget. How do they do that? They understand projects involve two kinds of action.
We generally understand the 'real work' of projects (value-adding) to be that which touches material or produces something. These people in Milwaukee understand an equally important work is linguistic action. What do I mean? All deliberate action between two or more people involves assessing, requesting, and promising.
Each week the 17+ trades foremen come together to plan with each other what they will have their crews do in the up-coming week. The meeting takes the same form from one week to the next. They start by reviewing the current week's planning performance. How much of what they said they would do did they get done? For every case that they didn't complete as promised they perform a five why analysis so they can investigate the source of the plan failure. They follow this conversation by reviewing the next six weeks of the plan looking particularly at those issues (constraints) that could keep them from performing as desired. People step-up to address the constraints to the plan making promises. Finally, the foremen say what they will do for the coming week. Negotiations occur to resolve where two crews may want to work in the same area at the same time (much like two programmers both wanting to check out code at the same time). They end the meeting with a new plan for the coming week based on the informed commitments of the people closest to the work.
I often hear people say meetings are a waste. The 'real work' happens outside of the meeting. But not with this group. They take these conversations — linguistic action — very seriously. And well they should. When asked how the project was going, the project superintendent replied, "It's running on rails."
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October 22nd, 2002 at 11:13 pm
Hi,
this must be one of the few building projects I have heard of to be running on rails.
Hereabouts they are known to be notoriously way behind schedule.
Why is that the case?
And why might it indeed be, that your site might the exception?
Three words, Project goal, line of command and good communication.
Usually you have a billion sub-sub-sub-subcontractors running around the site, half of them not knowing the local language(there`s a murderous price dumping war on european building sites) and 3/4 of them not knowing who has the say, an Architect who changes the designs in midstride, even when part of the building has already been built.
At least this is the case here in Germany
This is the best recepie for pm desaster…
Or you just live with it and take PM not so seriously, simply because tomorrow everything could just look completely different
So who cares if you have calculated
that the project will be at least a month late, if tomorrow the architect could barge into the office door and tell everybody, well guys, all`s off, we`re not going to build a Cinema, and 1000m2 of shopping area, nope, it`s gonna be 1500m2of shopping and the rest is for practices and office space, yeah, complete new statiks and room layout, that`s fun and keeps you on your toes
So getting everything in line and running smoothly is the first step,
but in an everchanging environment you have to stay flexible…
I have heard that in America building projects are planned right down to the nity gritty, e.g. where the sockets go.
After that has been agreed up the project starts and no changes are made to the plans until the project has been finished - is that true??? - That must be PM-heaven
Ok, enough of these dreams, off to my gantt charts…
Bye
Buck
October 24th, 2002 at 1:26 am
Hi Buck,
Sorry, I didn’t notice your comment.
Projects in The States are also notoriously behind schedule. In fact, so many construction projects are late and over budget that folks have stopped complaining about it. It is the accepted case.
The Milwaukee hospital project (and many others like it) uses a different project management approach The Last Planner System™. Read about it at http://www.leanconstruction.org/pdf/LastPlanner.pdf. (You’ll have to register at the site to get to the paper.)
You note that project participants act independent of one another changing the design without warning, not showing up to do work, or working ahead getting the project out of sequence. These issues happen in the US as well. The elegance of the LPS™ is the recognition that planning is a recurring conversation that produces coherency of commitments to deliver on the promises of the project to the customer. I know of no other approach in construction that does that.
October 24th, 2002 at 6:13 am
Hi Hal
(what was the name of the film with this computer named Hal?)
Thanks for the link, I´ll check it out.
Bye
Buck