Make work ready planning focuses on looking ahead four to six weeks in the project. You identify any uncompleted tasks that would keep planned work from starting as scheduled. Also known as constraints, we are looking at any directives, resources or prerequisite work not shown on the pull plan schedule. These constraints need to be removed, then the activity is “made ready.”

The meeting to “make work ready” makes the constraints visible, looks at the handoffs and expands them. It is vital to prepare in advance for this meeting. Follow this advice and we promise your work will be ready for the next week.

• Review—Familiarize yourself with the constraints before you sit down to meet with your last planners. To maximize the productivity of the meeting you need to keep on top of the project. With a quick refresher in advance you should avoid any surprises.

• Meet often—Frequent, short meetings are far more productive than one long, occasional meeting. If you take five minutes every day to do this you will save time and avoid problems that occur when you try to tackle everything at once.

• Meet in advance—The make work ready meeting should be in advance of your scheduled work days. You don’t want to save it for the Friday night before you want to start work on Saturday morning.

Like most of the steps in the Last Planner® System, making work ready requires a little bit of preparation and planning to be successful. Putting the time into the preparation will result in fewer work stoppages and better collaboration between contractors. It does not take much to achieve big payoffs in keeping your project on track.