Archive for the 'lean' Category

Design is hot! The subject has been in numerous publications in the last month. Even US News and World Report has led with stories on design. In the Oct 2 issue they reported on IDEO's influence on new product developement and general design influences, The Deans of Design.

Design is important to all of us doing projects. Tom Kelley, principal of IDEO, claims, "We approach (design) from the point of view that the answer is out there, hidden in plain sight, so let's go observe human behavior and see where the opportunities are." Given that projects are usually one-off creations, design continues throughout the project. We need to get comfortable — anticipating design changes — with the process.

Participating in prototyping can make a big difference in the success of the project. Sometimes I see teams acting like they are at effect of design. They even say, "These guys still don't know what they want us to build." That's not good for anyone, particularly the client. When the project performers participate in design activities the overall project has less rework, delay, and lower cost.

This collaborative effort requires a rather enlightened design team. Designing with those people who will build the item takes a different set of skills. Those skills and practices are exactly what is needed to create products and projects that stand out.

Stay tuned. I'll write more on design in the coming weeks.

While Toyota is in 3rd place in the US behind Ford and GM, it ranks 2nd in sales worldwide and 1st when it comes to profitability and value of the company. It seems everyone is paying attention to Toyota and their lean ways. Toyota made the cover of the September issue of Baseline Magazine, What's Driving Toyota? Baseline is a Ziff Davis publication catering to IT professionals. (ZD also publishes PC Magazine and eWeek.) While there is a decidedly IT bent — read the Baseline executive summary¹ — author Mel Duvall shows himself to be quite the student of the Toyota Production System and The Toyota Way. You won't read a better 11-page description of what makes Toyota the world's best manufacturer.

While we can be fascinated with Toyota, we better get started on our own lean path.

One thing stood out for me. Toyota's go slow to go fast approach — nemawashi — is practiced throughout the enterprise. The author gives a number of project examples of how Toyota executives take the time up front to establish clear roles, objectives, communication channels, and experiments. This up front consensus-building time allows Toyota and their partners to accomplish big goals together. Try talking your clients and bosses into taking more time at the beginning of your project to clarify performer roles. Who wants to pay for that? Toyota does. And their returns are the evidence that the rest of us should take that time too.

While we can be fascinated with Toyota, we better get started on our own lean path. There's no better place to start than on projects. Each project offers the opportunity for experimentation. Set your goals with the project performers and constituents. Take the time to establish roles and communication channels. And keep your attention on what you are learning as your project unfolds. Then, share your learning broadly within your firm. Your future viability just might depend on it.

1. "Behind Toyota's power drive are sophisticated information systems supporting and enabling the business processes that help the car maker eliminate waste, limit inventory buildup and continually improve production." [ ⇑ back ]

Fortune Magazine has a special section on being effective in work. Anne Fisher (Ask Annie) writes the column. Back in March '06 Annie wrote Be Smarter at Work, Slack Off, a piece on the value of not being overburdened particularly when doing creative tasks. She wrote,

(I)t's really, really hard, if not impossible, for the human brain to come up with fresh new ideas when its owner is overworked, overtired, and stressed out. And in today's wonderful world of nonstop work, 40% of American adults get less than seven hours of sleep on weeknights.

"The physiological effects of tiredness are well-known. You can turn a smart person into an idiot just by overworking him," notes Peter Capelli, a professor of management at Wharton.

Capelli is not the only one offering that advice. 40 years earlier, one famed management theorist said something similar.

"All one can think and do in a short time is to think what one already knows and to do as one has always done."
Peter Drucker

Some companies know better. They create the situation that keeps their designers in a condition to do their best work.

"We want to take as much hurry and worry out of people's lives as we can, because a relaxed state of mind unleashes creativity," says Stacy Sullivan, (Google's) HR director. "And everybody's on flextime here, so we don't reward face time or working super-long hours. We just measure results."

Lean design — designing for high value without corresponding waste of negative iterations and difficulty in production — demands groups of people come together in ways that call on the diversity of experience, expertise, and judgement in collaborative ways. Even one person who is overburdened can keep the team from doing its best work. A little slacking off from each of the participants might make all the difference.

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"Ford needs to remake itself once more, this time in the image of the company that copied Ford’s original system: Toyota."

James Womack is one of the key people¹ who introduced the world to the dominance of lean approaches over conventional business approaches. He continues to engage company leaders in discussions inviting and imploring them to adopt lean approaches to their business. One way he does that is with his regular emails to Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI) members². In his latest email, The Lean Way Forward at Ford, Jim recounts Ford's historical contributions to lean and offers his opinion of how they came to their current fate. He finished that email this way:

"…my prescription for new Ford CEO Alan Mullaly is the same (as it was for former CEO Jac Nassar): Fundamentally rethink the supplier management system. Fundamentally rethink the product development system. And fundamentally rethink the production system from order to raw materials and from raw materials to delivery, with special attention to the information management system. (Much can still be learned from Ford’s Mazda subsidiary, which became an able pupil of Toyota after a crisis in 1973.) Above all, fundamentally rethink what mangers do and how they do it in order to regain the gemba consciousness that originally took Ford to world dominance. In brief, Ford needs to remake itself once more, this time in the image of the company that copied Ford’s original system: Toyota."

None of us have to repeat the fate of the once-mighty Ford. Not on the factory floor; not in product development; not for those of us who make our livings in project-based firms. Getting lean is no longer an option.

1. Norman Bodek, founder of Productivity Press, translated and published over 300 Japanese-language books including Taiichi Ohno's and Shigeo Shingo's. The other person is Jeffrey Liker, author of the easy-to-read book on lean The Toyota Way. [ ⇑ back ]
2. Visit http://www.lean.org to subscribe. Use "Member Sign-up" at the bottom right corner of the homepage to get a free subscription and gain immediate access to all the valuable content on the LEI web site about implementing lean. [ ⇑ back ]

Can you guess what industry change the following quote is about?

"Failed implementations aren't new…even after a decade of industry advice about helping employees help themselves, executives still run head-on into end-user buy-in rejection."

Making a change to deliver projects lean is an organizational matter not a lean matter.

Any number of guesses could be correct. It is not about adopting lean approaches to delivering projects. But it could have been. Making a change to deliver projects lean is an organizational matter not a lean matter. Affecting any organization-wide change is tough, even for those who know what they are doing. Many companies are attempting a level of a change that they've never made before.
I see companies make the same mistake. They focus on the technical aspects of the underlying change without considering the human side of the change. The whole field of "change management" is focussed on being effective with whatever change is underway. With lean, change never ends.

"The process of winning over end-users doesn't end with the project go-live." Bob Stutz

I overheard someone speculating what would come after lean. I laughed. I can't imagine someone at Toyota wondering what would come next. Any casual student knows Toyota will minimize variation, un-burden operations, and eliminate more waste. In other words, more of the same. According to Gary Convis, Toyota can work on that for another 30 years.
The first quotation was from the opening paragraph of You'll Like It, by Marshall Lager, appearing in the August edition of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Magazine. CRM is "just" a computer system coupled with new procedures. Becoming lean is committing oneself and the organization to a paradigm change. Imagine how difficult that could be. (For all of you CRM folk, please don't shoot me. I implemented ERP systems. I know how challenging it can be implementing systems change.)
Next, I'll share the Five Necessary Actions for Organizational Change that we use to plan introducing lean project delivery to a company.

Today I visited NUMMI with a group of 10 construction people. We did the standard tour. Then we followed it with a luncheon where we discussed what we could bring back to our project settings. All participants had read and discussed The Toyota Way, by Jeffrey Liker. It was quite easy to see one example after another taken right out of the book.

The two big opportunities were adopting project-based kaizen and communicating current project results publicly every day in prominent public places. We'll try them both out on a healthcare project underway in California. I'll let you know what we learn.

This is the year of the language action perspective for project management. IGLC researchers have been exploring underlying theory of projects seriously for the last 7 years. The discussion appeared to be reaching a conclusion earlier this year with Glenn Ballard's and Lauri Koskela's paper, "Should project management be based on theories of economics or production?" for Building Research and Information. Greg Howell and I concluded that project management (in general) shouldn't be based on either. We wrote our paper to answer what should it be based on. Then, I invited Fernando Flores to speak to the IGLC. As it turned out, Greg ceded our time for presenting our paper to Fernando so he could speak longer. Our paper was not presented. I'll do my best to present it here.

What Should Project Management Be Based On?

I have to start any discussion off by saying how we understand projects.

Projects are unique undertakings of a group of people convened to fulfill a promise made by one person to a customer.

Construction projects are like software projects and class reunions when understood from the above definition. Those three types of projects are dissimilar, as well. But it is the similarity that guided our look at projects to allow us to reach our conclusions on the theory base for projects. Read the rest of this entry ¶

Client changes to apartment designs after the project starts are both expected and disruptive. The researchers were curious how lean approaches might mitigate the impacts of those changes. They built a role-playing simulation to collect data then modeled it with simulation software. The results were stunning.

Evaluation of Lean Improvements in Residential Construction

Rafael Sacks and Alberto Esquenazi

The researchers called on their students to build a Lego simulation of a construction project. Design changes were introduced along the way. The students played the game to collect data that was then used in the computer simulation.

"Reduced batch size appears to be the key to improving workflow."

They wanted to explore how lean approaches might affect the performance of construction results. They modeled these approaches:

• Align the flows
• Pull flow
• Single-piece flow
• Make ready process
• Stabilize the workplan
• Streamline the process by changing construction methods

The simulation started with a traditional push system. The second round introduced the lean approaches. When going from traditional to lean approaches throughput increased along with cash flow.

Stroboscope was used to investigate the effects of the individual lean approaches. The simulation results were stunning. Reducing batch size was the main source of improving cash flow. Multi-skilled teams in a push environment improved time but reduced the amount of work done. But cutting batch size and multi-skilled teams was responsible for the biggest improvement in throughput. Only when customization is required does pull flow make a big contribution.

The authors concluded that reduced batch size appears to be the key to improving workflow. It has positive effects on WIP levels, cash flow, and project completion time.

Precast productivity in one construction setting already was improved from 28 man-hours/cubic meter to 21 man-hours/cubic meter due to prior improvement initiatives. But the plant suffered from product variation. The LPS was introduced to address it.

Stabilization and Standardization of a Precast Production Process

Carlos Antonio Samaniego Gallardo, et al

Carlos started by introducing a Production Status Andon¹. They started with a blackboard in the production area. The workers developed the approach further and in three weeks had a more sophisticated approach. They were investigating in an empirical way what process steps provided a rhythm to the process. The Last Planner® was introduced to bring reliability to the process.

Stabilize production activities with andons.

PPC improved from 25% to 75% in about three months. During the same time productivity was further improved to 16 man-hours/cubic meter. They attribute their results to:

• Adopting an analysis-implementation-evaluation cycle that also increased participation
• Adopting basic lean approaches including standardized work and value stream mapping
• Bringing organization with a daily task schedule

Fabrication operations offer great potential for adopting lean approaches. As key parts of the supply chain on construction projects getting lean upstream can have some downstream positive outcomes from higher quality and reliability of completions.

1. Andon is the Japanese word for "signal" or to bring attention to something. Andons are used to alert others to come for help. [ ⇑ back ]

Traditional tools for representing and understanding the whole of a project can overwhelm people with data. A digital construction model can be of great help. Three case studies were pursued to explore the utility.

Multidimensional Modeling: A Mechanism for Improving Construction Project Management

Luis Izaguirre and Luis Alarcon

They reviewed two lines of research: Virtual Design and Construction (Stanford) and nD¹ Modelling (Salford Univ). They chose the first approach because the tools are commercially available. They connected this work to the lean construction principles. This allowed them to make assessments of the utility of those principles and to set goals.

Companies need to promote a positive approach to avoid perceptions of punishment when errors are found.

The model allowed them to detect errors in quantities, space, time, and execution strategy. In addition, they incorporated concerns for safety. In another study, just using a 3D model they saved 40% in the schedule along with a reduction of 287 design defects that were resolved before construction.

Use of the multidimensional model offers a simple and transparent coordination, control, and planning process. They found dramatic reductions in variation and uncertainty. Along the way they learned to create 3D models from scratch in short or very reasonable times. Even late interventions with modeling are worthwhile investments.

1. Refers to dimensions beyond 3D and 4D (time) to incorporate concerns for safety, operations, maintenance, etc. [ ⇑ back ]

There is never enough time to design the production system for construction, yet there is more than enough time for making do. Simulations offer promise for changing that.

Simulation as a Tool for Production System Design

Thais da C.L. Alves, et al (presented by Prof. Iris Tommelein)

Using the design and fabrication of ductwork and ductwork fittings to They used Stroboscope¹ to model the process. They modelled the process on both deterministic and stochastic basis. The results produced large inventories on the construction site. By adding a "supermarket" rule² to initiate new work orders. Inventory dropped. They then ran the model by allowing variation. As anticipated when they ran the model they eventually got a stockout of ready work (in the 76th period). Based on this they reset their supermarket level.

The simulation models can be wonderful learning tools. Teams can experiment with production system designs before actually doing the work. The effects of variation on production system performance is highlighted.

1. Discreet event simulation environment developed by Julio Martinez, Ph.D. for the construction market. [ ⇑ back ]
2. The simplest form is to replenish stock when a certain level is achieved. [ ⇑ back ]

Why are construction companies reluctant to adopt new ideas? This UK-based study suggests it is a matter of habits.

Drivers for Innovation in Production Management

Carl Abbot, et al

The researchers compared the construction industry to all other industries. They found that in the areas of product innovation, process innovation, and long term views construction firms exhibit far less innovative actions than others. They conclude that the big majority of companies are focused on survival.

"Small involvement with innovation can move firms out of the survival mode."

Looking at different innovation processes and the results, it is easy to focus on the improvements. The researchers claim that what firms learn while innovating is far more important to on-going improvement. (That doesn't seem quite right to me.)

"Notions of learning and knowledge sharing have much to contribute towards achieving organizational performance."

Indonesian Contractors' Readiness towards Lean Construction

Muhamad Abdu and Hengki a Roza (Muhamad made this presentation via a Skype connection.)

Academia in Indonesia is leading the way to introduce lean construction. Indonesian firms have the same problems in construction as found elsewhere: late projects, high waste, breaking budgets, rework, etc. Lean construction has been identified as the means to address this. Like other countries, Indonesians are showing some hesitance towards adopting lean.

Use the survey questions to gauge your own readiness for lean construction.

They are using an assessment tool coupled with a relationship map to make their assessments. They performed a case study involving 3 major ISO 9000 certified contractors. They are interested to gauge how contractors' current efforts in four major areas influenced their readiness to adopt lean approaches. Those areas are:

• Reducing Cycle Time
• Reducing Variability
• Increasing Transparency
• Continuous Improvement

In these firms they found a high adoption of continuous improvement practices, yet they showed a lower level of familiarity with reducing cycle time. From these assessments they made predictions about the challenges the firms would encounter when they adopt lean practices.

I found the study and approach to be a good way to assess a starting-off condition for the basis of an implementation approach.

Subcontractors have a different focus from contractors derived in part from working on multiple projects simultaneously rather than one at a time. The researchers used a computer simulation to examine resource allocation behaviors.

Subcontractor Resource Allocation in a MultiProject Environment

Michael Harel and Rafael Sacks

They performed a survey of 28 contractors and 29 subcontractors for the basis of establishing a better utility function than the inferred "win as much as you can" approach.

In only 55% of the cases did PMs enable subcontractors to work with effective crew sizes

Some of the findings:

• More than 48% of project managers admitted to exagerating resource requirements by at least 20%
• More than 75% of project managers assume a priori that Subs will bring less than 80% of the resources needed
• The average amount of work ready expected was only 60%
• 40% of PMs admit that contract price was the prime reason for selectin a subcontractor

• The researchers concluded that in only 55% of the cases did PMs enable subcontractors to work with effective crew sizes.
• Subcontractors adopt a defensive behavior of overbooking their resources while supplying fewer resources than demanded.

The survey results confirmed the original mistrust-exploit view of contractor-subcontractor behavior. PMs and Subs are more likely to play 'Win as Much as You Can' than not.

Agile Project Management (APM) arose in the software world. The lean construction community has investigated APM to see what might be cross appropriated. Why would it matter? Agile approaches are gaining favor and producing better results for software development.

Is Agile Project Management Applicable to Construction?

Bob Owen, et al

Agile had a similar starting point with that of lean project delivery. Projects were just not getting done to the satisfaction of the users, the sponsors, and the performers. Agile also has to deal with an evolving understanding of what will satsify the client. And the client has a changing understanding of what they need and want. Conducting the project in a way that embraces learning is central to developing the project while avoiding waste.

"APM is most appropriate to project situations that require emergent requirements."

Bob comes from the IT community. He's doing research and getting his PhD in Lean Construction. He is arguing that APM would be a good fit at least during the design and preconstruction phases. He says organizations need to:

• Embrace change to improve value
• Establish a learning organization
• Committed and loyal workforce

"APM is most appropriate to project situations that require emergent requirements."

Currently, people seem to not be ready to participate in lean construction environments. Catolica University, Santiago, Chile has a Center of Excellence in Production Management (GEPUC) that is researching and developing a competency profile that supports the adoption and expansion of lean construction in companies and industry.

Qualifying People to Work in Lean Construction

Ignacio Pavez and Luis Alarcon

This is an important paper. The authors have researched the skills necessary to perform well in project management roles. They found that people are not generally prepared in school for the roles they play in industry. Current industry is fragmented in the approaches to managing projects. Adopting lean approaches exaggerates the situation. Project manager-leaders have a new responsibility to bring about a change in standard practices while acquiring new skills for themselves.

"Lean requires a social competence to develop relationships among team members."

They have defined a structure for a lean construction professional profile (LCPP) that could serve as a basis for developing assessments and providing training opportunities. They are continuing in their process of surveying "lean construction experts" to develop the criteria further.

The Last Planner System® (LPS) has been used in Brazil since early 1990s. The researchers have data on over 130 projects representing many aspects of the construction industry.

Quantitative Analysis of Data Collected from LPS in Brazil

Rodrigo Bortolazza and Carlos Formoso

The researchers examined PPC results, recorded causes for variances, and

"Lengthening the look-ahead planning horizon improves plan reliability."

They had three surprising conclusions:

• Projects which didn't conduct constraints analysis had better performance than those that did constraints analysis.
• Standardized process control in quality management contributed to plan reliability
• When researchers were on site PPC was lower.

Based on those surprises they developed a constraints removal index: constraints removed divided by constraints identified. When this index was applied retrospectively for one company the index was about 35%. When the firm started using the index for measuring the effectiveness of the team the index jumped to about 70%. PPC consequently rose.

A good look-ahead process with constraints analysis and removal makes a large contribution to the reliability of project. There was a high correlation between a high number of "unknown" causes of plan variance and low PPC. Also, the largest proportion of reasons for plan variance had to do factors in the control of the people on the project.

I'll come back to this paper in a future posting to share more of the conclusions and implications of their investigations.