The greatest impact you can have on a project outcome is in the early phases, where during the concept design thinking, you create some of the success frameworks for delivery through which your project will evolve.
By the time you’re at the pre-construction, execution phase and beyond, it’s likely there’ll a whole lot of inefficiencies built into the project which result in many different types of waste.
Taiichi Ohno, whose founding role in the development of the concepts of Lean birthed the concept of Lean Manufacturing, identified 7 key types of waste all of which are very relevant but mostly invisible or ignored on large / major projects:
- Mistakes or defects;
- Overproduction of parts, raw materials, steel etc;
- Stock or Inventories waiting around for a next stage in any given process;
- People waiting for things to happen, materials to be available etc before they can proceed;
- Unnecessary processing, doing things which are actually not even going to be required;
- The mobilisation of teams where they are not required; and
- Transport of goods that was not really required.
The same basic wastes occur just as much in most major projects as they do in manufacturing, causing expensive losses of time, money and negative morale.
The quality of the thinking and planning work done at the outset can however greatly reduce waste, but how do you do this, if the systems in place are already inefficient?
Lean Manufacturing, Lean Construction and Lean in an Enterprise, is all about the elimination of inefficiency and waste with a focus rather on high-performance cultures and efficient processes. The results include improved profitability, more engaged clients, more motivated teams and in many cases increased environmental sustainability.
By changing your up front thinking and the way you engage with your key clients, stakeholders, JV, Alliance, PPP or other project partners you can have a really positive influence around the success or failure or projects measured off the traditional time, cost, quality safety parameters we all ultimately live by.
A simple video description of some of the Lean Construction concepts can be found here:
Author: Hunter Dean see https://www.linkedin.com/in/hunterdean/ for LinkedIn Profile
Based in Melbourne Australia and Wellington New Zealand http://www.hunterdean.com
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