Reforming Project Management » safety

Use Near-Misses to Learn about Construction Safety

Hal — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 02:52:05 +0000

: Image by Elliot Moore via Flickr

Ihaven't written about construction safety in awhile. I used to write about it every Thursday. I just read an ENR editorial Analyzing Near-Misses Is Key to An Effective Safety Plan. It reminded me of how far we need to go in construction. Our industry kills about 1300 people in the US every year. Thousands of others are seriously injured. Yet, there are far more dangerous industries where people are not getting hurt at anywheres near the construction rates. Alcoa has made amazing strides to create an injuring-free workplace in their smelters. Dupont's chemical operations as dangerous as those processes are don't result in anything near the injuries of construction. These companies and many others across industries all have one thing in common that is fundamentally missing in construction. They systematically learn from each anomaly, variance, problem and near-miss. It's an approach that separates Toyota from all the other auto manufacturers. It's an approach that we can adopt today for safety.

They systematically learn from each anomaly, variance, problem and near-miss.Near-misses happen all the time. I could be working on a ladder and drop a screwdriver. That's a near-miss. No one needs to be under the ladder, they don't even need to be in the work area. That I dropped the screwdriver is unintended and potentially injurious. In the usual situation I might say, "Oops!" getting down off the ladder, retrieving my screwdriver, and going back to work. However, someone could have been injured, or worse. It's exactly this kind of situation that we need to investigate. If we can learn why that incident happened, then we have a chance to prevent it from ever happening again. How do we do that? We call attention to our mistake and get to the root cause.

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Post tags: Engineering News-Record, Root cause, Toyota

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Construction Safety – Good News or Bad

Hal — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 15:49:23 +0000

Beware of headlines. ENR reports: Fatalities Fell in 2007, Labor Dept. Reports. The story leads by telling us construction deaths were down 5% in 2007. Shall we celebrate? I think not. Have a look:

Fatalities	Construction*	Other Industry
2007	1,178 (p)	3,778 (p)
2006	1,239	4,081
2005	1,192	4,022
2004	1,234	3,995
2003	1,131	3,912
p: Preliminary Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, * as reported by ENR

You don't have to be a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt to see that the latest results are consistent with the expected results. The mean for the five years is 1,195 deaths and the standard deviation is 44. The latest year is within 1 standard deviation of the mean. A more accurate headline might read
No Change in Construction Fatalities. But the situation is worse than the headline suggests.

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OSHA Fines Concrete Contractor $870,000

Hal — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 22:44:32 +0000

Pay attention: OSHA has fined Broadway Concrete for 15 willful violations involving fall protection and unprotected rebar on a 50-story NYC building. Let's not let it happen again.

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Be Lean…Build Lean

Hal — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 15:07:22 +0000

As 2007 came to a close, lean design and construction got some well-deserved press. The manufacturing community shares their successes and learning about lean through Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME) and their "Target Magazine". Most lean manufacturers operate in buildings that were neither designed or built lean. That can change. Karen Wilhelm, writing for Target, spent quite some time investigating the lean construction movement. She shares what she learned in a cover story, Collaboration Makes Construction Lean.

"The culture of heroes works against the smooth flow of work."

I won't spoil the article for you by summarizing it. Not only does Karen write well, she shares a vision of what we can be doing in the built environment. I will offer one teaser…(...)
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Surprise! It’s a Lean Herrero at the 9th Lean Construction Congress

Hal — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 20:39:16 +0000

It's that time of year again. I'm attending the Lean Construction Congress in San Francisco. This is the 9th annual event. As usual, the focus is on companies who have adopted lean approaches for delivering AEC projects. The morning presentations have been great. Company presenters are doing a fine job speaking about the benefits they are getting and how the lean approaches and principles cause that to happen.

Becoming lean and being evermore lean is fundamentally about learning, not about lean.

It's a little early in the two days to be saying this, but what the heck… Herrero Contractors, not yet three years into their lean transformation, is the most advanced lean contractor in the US.¹ Herrero understands that becoming lean and being evermore lean is fundamentally about learning, not about lean. They seem to be learning everywhere and everyday.

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Construction Project Silence Puts Safety at Risk

Hal — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 01:57:28 +0000

Bad concrete and wrong epoxy are just two of the problems with the Big Dig. ENR ran two stories in the August 5, 2007 issue detailing guilty pleas on criminal charges along with failure to act responsibly with structural design issues. Certainly, the whole project is not bad. But living in Boston, we worry not knowing which parts are bad. While money is always a possible motive, in this case people clearly were not exercising their responsibilities as custodians of public safety. In short, few were speaking up and fewer still were listening.

The Two Great Wastes contribute in significant, yet incalculable ways, to the failings on all projects.

I know first-hand how easy it is to just drive on by safety issues. It's easy to think, "Somebody must be taking care." Last Friday I drove by a police construction detail where a new home was being connected to a sewer line in the center of a state road. There were two police officers along with two flag persons and a 1/2 dozen workers. One man was neck deep in a straight-cut narrow trench shoveling loose gravel. In the situation I describe OSHA requires a trench box anytime a trench is 5 feet or more deep. From my passing view, this worker was just about at that limit. Was a trench box required? I don't know. There was no trench box present. I didn't stop. I should have stopped. But had I stopped, what conversation would I had and with whom? To my knowledge, no one was injured. No incident occurred. But it is really beside the point. I feel terrible for not stopping.

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Boston Globe Slams Construction Industry

Hal — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 02:30:59 +0000

Construction projects get a bad rep…a very bad rep. And the Boston Globe piles on with today's article The Industry that Time Forgot: Just Another Day at the Office for the Most Wasteful, Least Productive Industry in America

It's tough for me to comment on this article. I live in Boston. We've suffered major delays, overruns, inconveniences, and people lost their lives. It doesn't have to be this way. Companies have learned from the best operators in the world and have avoided these problems. In Massachusetts we have burdensome laws and practices. It's tough to do business with the state government. In my town no major project has finished on time or on budget. However, it can change. It must change. The industry knows what to do to change.

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Safety and Quality In Health Care and Construction

Hal — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 02:34:14 +0000

The CBS follow-up story to Katie Couric's interview, One Doctor's Crusade For Hospital Reform is a good read. CBS highlighted the everyday benefits of high capability processes on our lives. The interview opens this way with Dr. Berwick saying,

"Hospitals are very dangerous places. I don't know how to explain this to the public in a way that doesn't create too much fear. But they need to be realistic, and the technologies that help you can also hurt you — and they do it every single day."

Improving process quality and safety creates more time for engaging with people.

Studies indicate that 15 million patients are injured or get some sort of insufficient care each year. Some where between 44,000 and 96,000 die unnecessarily. Dr. Berwick and the 3,100 IHI partner hospitals have set out to change that. They are making their improvements in the same way that Toyota and other high-capability companies make their improvements. IHI is adopting Lean Six Sigma. Dr. Berwick goes on to say, (...)
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Even Doctors Cry when they Speak of Lean Six Sigma

Hal — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 03:08:44 +0000

Let me start by saying I'm not taking a shot at doctors. In fact, I'm writing about IHI because I think we need to deliberately set out to learn from people outside our industry. Thanks to doctors like Dr. Berwick we are making great strides in the delivery of safe medical services. I'd like to reference tonight's CBS broadcast of IHI's initiatives. Unfortunately, the CBS website is way behind the times. Not only can't I find the broadcast video, but the site doesn't display correctly in either Internet Explorer or Firefox. Still, I hope you caught Katie Couric's interview. Dr. Berwick and IHI lifted my spirits; I'm sure it will lift your spirits too.(...)
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Katie Couric Spotlights Healthcare Lean Initiatives

Hal — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 04:43:00 +0000

Don Berwick is on a mission to eliminate deaths from medical mistakes in hospitals. His 100k Lives campaign at the Institute of Healthcare Improvement is making great headway. And along the way many people are noticing., including Katie Couric. On Tuesday evening CBS News will showcase Dr. Berwick and his lean approach to healthcare improvement. Here's the CBS announcement:

"The Institute of Medicine recently estimated that nearly 100,000 people die every year due to medical mistakes. Couric profiles Don Berwick, a Harvard-trained pediatrician and public health expert, who is trying to make American healthcare safer. (...)
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What Project Planning Approach Improves Construction Safety?

Hal — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 21:41:10 +0000

Article Series - Improving Construction Safety

The Key to Improve Construction Safety
What Project Planning Approach Improves Construction Safety?

Some people think that construction safety is a matter of establishing safety as a value. If people value safety, those people argue, then workers will work safely. While that might be true, we don't have time for that. It can take years to establish a value for anything. The task of producing the value for safety becomes more difficult with new people always being introduced to the construction environment. We need to improve safety immediately. And we can.

While most planning approaches define what should be done that is insufficient to assure work will be done.

In the previous post in this series I said we need to follow the rule to only do work that is in a condition to be started and finished. But how do we do that without impacting productivity? Working to the safety rule is supported by a process for making work ready.

Making work ready — including all aspects for working safely — is an aspect of the planning system. While most planning approaches define what should be done that is insufficient to assure work will be done.(...)
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The Key to Improve Construction Safety

Hal — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 19:33:20 +0000

Article Series - Improving Construction Safety

The Key to Improve Construction Safety
What Project Planning Approach Improves Construction Safety?

Construction safety has to improve. Fast. But it hasn't. Not in over 15 years. About 1,200 people have been dying on construction sites each of those 15 years in the United States. An average of 4 deaths each workday. One thing that has changed in those 15 years is that now Latinos make up a disproportionate number of those deaths. And many more are injured every day.

All it takes is a planning process for making work ready.

The basic approach to safety has only changed slightly. At OSHA's instigation, safety promotion — usually practiced as sloganeering coupled with rewards and punishment — has been supplemented with an increased attention on education. Some companies have benefited from it. However, even the relatively safe firms have a way to go. I won't write a long essay on this. I just want to share one action we can immediately adopt that will make construction sites far safer. And there is data to support it.

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