Off to Colorado
December 10th, 2002 by HalWe wrap-up our Lean Project Leadership (Shusa) Program this week with a visit to Colorado. (The next program starts the end of January 2003.) While there I'll be delivering a guest lecture at the Colorado State University graduate program of Construction Management while Greg Howell visits the University of Colorado to do the same. Both of us are speaking on Projects, Planning, and Promising. We are trying out our thinking in advance of writing a paper for the 12th Annual International Group for Lean Construction Conference. The conference will be held at Virginia Polytechnic at the end of July 2003. (No IGLC program description is currently available.)
I'll also be visiting a a construction project where the project team has been operating on the Last Planner System™. I plan to write about both the lectures and the visit to the jobsite. With a little luck, I might even get to ski!
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December 12th, 2002 at 5:35 am
Hal offered his lecture at CSU last night. It was great, and I took away more than the formal content from it. The first lesson learned came from the questions about lean delivery raised by students. For example: Are you saying that all we’ve heard about WBS is BS? How do you develop the detailed tasks that you are proposing? What if someone doesn’t want to play ball? And so on. Some of the best questions came from undergraduates. The similarity of these questions and the ones you hear from practitioners at LCI events was remarkable. There is much to learn from listening to these questions about the reservations that are likely to be raised when teaching lean. Instruction should be elaborated with these concerns in mind, and I took note of each one of them.
Another notable issue in Hal’s lecture was that he barely ever mentioned the word “lean.” He was able to develop his points around familiar / standard terms that people felt comfortable with. This added substantially more credibility to his delivery, because he did not portrait himself as the Possessor of the Occult Knowledge. That was a great second point to be learned from the lecture.
In summary, thanks, Hal, for the lecture and beer. I hope we can do it again.