Category: Project Delivery Performance

The use of Lean and collaborative delivery methods increases team performance on Major Projects

Hunter Dean

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:

  1. Mistakes or defects;
  2. Overproduction of parts, raw materials, steel etc;
  3. Stock or Inventories waiting around for a next stage in any given process;
  4. People waiting for things to happen, materials to be available etc before they can proceed;
  5. Unnecessary processing, doing things which are actually not even going to be required;
  6. The mobilisation of teams where they are not required; and
  7. 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

 

What is Lean Construction and or LPD – Lean Project Delivery?

Hunter Dean

Are you the delivery manager or project director on a major road, rail, mine or other construction project in Australia? Have you been hearing about how Lean Construction techniques may be able to significantly help your teams on site improve the way they do things?

Are you sceptical Lean Construction sounds like a BLACK BOX solution

I WAS!

Have you heard about it from several people who’ve not been able to “Pinpoint” exactly what it is or how and what it might do for you on your project? Does it seem to you a lot like TQM or other improvement methods you may have experienced across your career?

Lean Construction or LPD explained in one paragraph.

Lean Construction is a process to change the way workflows occur on projects so they are more predictable and reliable. On every construction site there are wasted resources e.g.: People standing around at times doing nothing, too much inventory sitting around on site, machinery not being used but being paid for etc. On work sites the average work complete each week verses that scheduled by teams sits at 40 to 60%. In other words most weeks work teams should have achieved 40 to 60% more productivity BUT THEY DON’T.

This results in project finish dates and budgets that continuously blow way over what they should be in costs and time.

Lean construction is a set of tools that enables major projects to streamline workflow reliability and predictability on sites. Its core focus is around optimising the project not the individual pieces, and it does this through making changes to the way project managers, superintendents, engineers, designers, procurement teams and others do some of the following:

Schedule using new methods

  • To increase performance
  • Have meetings that work
  • Track and monitor project costs
  • Use metrics on site that motivate

Lead in a new way

  • To collaborate with all teams
  • Spend (or not) spend time at sites
  • See the value of integrating supply chains into their processes

Use Continuous Learning Methods

  • Use continuous improvement in construction
  • Map value streams in to improve fabrication methods
  • Capture and transfer learnings through technology
  • Quality check without paper
  • Use CAD & BIM in new ways

Having spent time with some of the Co-Founders of Lean Construction I became intrigued by how easily major projects can benefit by training their teams in these methods. This is not a one size fits all methodology but is one where almost every single project can find benefits.

Lean Construction Greg Howell - Hunter Dean

Hunter with Greg Howell one of the Co-Founders of Lean Construction.

I have not yet in this post mentioned the actual tools that have made Lean Construction famous like Pull Planning, Last Planner, Weekly work plans etc.

If you are interested and or are a sceptic like I was, then now may be the time to start looking into this field.

Author: Hunter Dean see https://www.linkedin.com/in/hunterdean/ for LinkedIn Profile

Based in Melbourne Australia www.hunterdean.com