Tuesday at NSC's Safety Congress & Expo: "OSHA, NIOSH Unveil Priorities for 2005. BLR reported that OSHA is making Voluntary Protection Program (VPP) participation their main priority for 2005. They will also give attention to worker driving. 1,149 companies participate in the VPP. The OSHA goal is 8,000.

As I am getting ready for the annual Lean Construction Institute Congress I came across Jeffrey Cufaude's, Idea Architects, Time to Get Serious About Learning. Jeffrey is a great writer and thinker. In this short essay he laments the "Aggressive vendor sales pitches loosely masquerading as quasi-educational infomercial." What makes the Lean Congress so different from other conferences is the total lack of vendors pitching the wares. The Congress is an event that gives member firms of LCI an opportunity to share what they are doing, learning, struggling with, and innovating in a collegial setting. Stay tuned for my postings on the presenters' topics.

OSHA announced a plan to offer the Voluntary Protection Plan (VPP) to a broad group in the construction industry. Previously only owners, general contractors, and projects of a long duration could qualify for a VPP. OSHA is recognizing that subcontractors and general contractors that do short projects can make a significant difference on the safety on a jobsite. They have published a set of guidelines and are asking for comments before going forward with those guidelines. The due date for comments is November 1, 2004.

Here's the draft Notice of VPPC program. Go here to leave a comment for OSHA.

I need to spend more time reading through the proposal before I offer my comments. I'll share those here at the same time I send them to OSHA. In the meantime, I urge you to read the draft document and send your comments to OSHA. The VPPC is perhaps the most important initiative OSHA has taken for the construction industry in the last 10 years. OSHA put it this way in the draft document:

"In calendar year 2002, construction companies accounted for an estimated six percent of total private sector employment, but almost nine percent of total work-related recordable injuries and illnesses. There were 1,121 work-related fatalities involving construction work, more than 20 percent of the private sector's 5,524 fatalities reported during that year."

I will comment on the program proposal in more detail over the next weeks. Please join me in getting behind this important initiative. Based on the success of VPP in other industries the VPPC is sure to make a significant contribution to the safety of our friends and colleagues.

Read Safety Everyday's construction safety in the news sideblog.

I've been attending many project meetings lately. They all had one thing in common. People spoke about what they would be doing without talking about what that would accomplish. Planning starts with the promises you make. Once you get clear about what you will accomplish, then what you do becomes clear.

The Project Reformer's e-Tip of the Week

035: Take the Time to Plan Outcomes before Activity

The language of project planning includes the nouns: milestones, activities, tasks, and durations. We use these terms like there is a well-understood common meaning for each term. We also use these terms like the relationship between the terms is equally agreed upon. Neither are the case. In spite of what you might find in a dictionary of project terminology, people use these terms differently, even in the same company and on the same project team. I won't take on the task of producing standardization. I'll leave that up to others. But I want to address a major problem with our current planning. Time after time people talk about their planning in doing terms using verbs rather than in the terms of the outcome of their doing using nouns. When we plan we want to place our attention first on what it is we are promising to produce — a product of our efforts. We can then get into what will it take us to produce that product. When we jump into the planning conversation saying what we will do first, then next, etc., we end up missing the key issues for satisfying our clients. Clients don't care about the doing. They care about the results (promises). Start each planning session with the outcomes. Take all the time you and your team need to be clear about the conditions of satisfaction for the result. Check those outcomes with your client. Only then move onto how you will produce the result. The Project Leaders' Studio™

©2004 Hal Macomber | weblog.halmacomber.com | e-Tip Archive | PDF | Submit Tip

Let's hear from you. Send me your tips on project management.

The Last Planner System® is routinely delivering projects on time and on budget. Want to know how? That will have to wait for another posting. But for today, I'll introduce you to Glenn Ballard and Greg Howell, the creators of the Last Planner System. They authored a 13-page paper for IGLC-11 sharing the current state of the approach and the open issues, An Update on the Last Planner.

• Work structuring: linking scheduling and production control
• Phase scheduling: providing goals for Last Planner
• A list of improvements and recommendations that have emerged from theory and practice.

Emphasize learning (changes in PPC) rather than absolute values of PPC.

Throughout the years the authors and innovators have made numerous distinctions about projects that orient us to a new paradigm of project management. One important set of distinctions is how they view work structuring and project schedules.

"(S)chedules are products of work structuring that specify goals and the handoffs between specialists required to achieve those goals. Production control has the job of achieving those handoffs or initiating replanning should that prove infeasible."

Glenn and Greg are not speaking about structuring projects through the contracting process. They are pointing to answering the question, "How will we do this work with each other?"

The authors made five recommendations:

1. Identify tasks and assignments that are either handoffs to someone else or that
   have implications for coordinating the use of shared resources.
2. Make customer acceptance explicitly the measure of release.
3. Emphasize learning (changes in PPC) rather than absolute values of PPC.
4. Incorporate linguistic action and reliable promising.
5. Measure PPC against planned day (versus week) for release.

LPS addresses the question "How will we do this work with each other?"

And they posed five questions:

1. Should work groups (squads, gangs, crews) meet daily to align assignments,
   identify make ready actions needed within the day, and identify problems
   requiring replanning?
2. How far in advance should commitments be made?
3. Should multiple levels of commitment be recognized?
4. How to better assure that (the) Last Planner (System) is used within a distributed control system?
5. Does application of the Last Planner system reduce the variability in duration of
   construction activities?

I am someone who helps teams adopt the LPS on their projects. So often people want to just use the six-week look-ahead plan and the weekly work plan. They think they are just using a different set of planning forms. The authors use this paper to show how the whole of the project planning and control approach changes. They also do something more important. They invite each of us to join them in research from the field as you use the Last Planner System on your projects. Want to learn from those who are already using the LPS? Join Glenn, Greg, and a group of practitioners in Park City, UT, September 14- 17, for the Sixth Annual Lean Construction Congress.

The Last Planner System™ (LPS) is a trademark of the Lean Construction Institute. The LPS is free for use. Join other users of the LPS at Planner2Planner.

The GAO, US Government Accountability Office, has come down hard on OSHA saying it is inconsistent in applying penalties and doing follow-up. Report faults OSHA's oversight of fines, follow-up inspections

The GAO just finished an investigation of OSHA. It concluded that fines are not imposed consistently and follow-up is lacking. John L. Henshaw, OSHA Deputy Secretary, responded saying,

"The agency needs some flexibility in assessing final penalties to reward the willingness of some employers to abate a hazard quickly and produce a safer workplace."

One finding showed big companies paid $1,097 more in fines than small companies. Yet small companies are more likely to ignore hazardous work situations.

BLR.com reported in OSHA Faulted on Oversight of Fine Calculations,

"The GAO reviewed audits from the five regions with the most inspections and discovered that some area offices miscalculated penalties and failed to conduct required follow-up inspections."

OSHA drives me crazy. Our industry (construction) is doing a terrible job with safety. Our friends are dying at a rate that far exceeds other industries. We've made virtually no progress in the last 12 years. We can stop this. We need to study the very best contractors and we need to impose stiff penalties on the worst. Nothing less than a change in our view on the situation will fix our problem. We need to cut our incidence rates by 75%. Is that possible? Not with the current thinking. But firms are doing exactly that. They are changing their approach and systems of planning by adopting a lean approach.

See the full text of the GAO Report on OSHA.

Read Safety Everyday's construction safety in the news sideblog.

I've been reading a new book from a new publisher. The Wharton School (U Penn) is getting into the publishing business. Their first book co-authored by one of their faculty is a winner. The Power of Impossible Thinking, by Jerry Wind and Colin Crook, has as its premise, "If you can think impossible thoughts, you can do impossible things." Last week Chuck Frey did a quick book summary at the Innovation Weblog How to See Differently. Chuck did a great job. He captured eight practices for impossible thinking from the authors' text.

• Listen to the radicals
• Embark on journeys of discovery
• Look across disciplines
• Question the routine
• Recognize the barriers
• Practice flying upside down
• Destroy the old model
• Envision multiple futures

What we think is what we see

One of the more important parts of the book is the 18-page appendix The Neuroscience behind Mental Models. Bear with me. I know the title can be off-putting. The authors do a very good job explaining why they say it is possible for impossible thinking. In a nutshell, what we think is what we see. If we want to see something else or something new, then we must adopt a different mental model.

What does this have to do with lean project delivery? People tell me it is impossible to think we can do projects with strangers without waste, delivered on time and on budget. The authors would argue that those people are right. They will not deliver projects with strangers without waste, delivered on time and on budget. However, there are numerous companies and project teams who think the impossible. They think they can. And they are also right. A division of one company delivered 29 projects in a row on time or early AND at or below budget. Now that's impossibility thinking!

Two days ago I introduced you to one of the better papers from the 11th IGLC Annual Conference, Achieving Change in Construction. One of the conclusions in that paper was the mental models are getting in the way of change. Our approach has been to fix the problems we encounter through automation, motivation, and process improvement. It hasn't worked as evidenced by productivity and injury rates that are stagnant. Achieving change in construction must start with changing our own mental models. Learn how by reading The Power of Impossible Thinking.