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Why It’s Time to Forget The Sticky Notes & Maximize Wall Space

If you are using sticky notes on a whiteboard, you are probably dedicated to a better way of planning and communication.  If you are consistently collaborating in a room with key stakeholders outside of your organization, you’re well on your way to developing a successful project team. You’re also probably aware of the inefficiencies that accompany your analog system.

Think about it: how often are you handling the data that is collected in your meetings?  Once to put it on the sticky note and onto the board. Another time to put it back onto the board because it fell off.  Then to get it from the board into your excel sheet where you compile your look-ahead schedule.  Not to mention the follow-on step where you blast out a PDF of your look-ahead to the rest of the team.

What if you only had to pull in the data associated with your plan one time, and from there you could simultaneously plan and communicate across the project team?  Acceptance and adoption of technology programs by the construction industry is much more common and software like Touchplan makes the lives of those managing this information much easier

Embrace The “Tech” Magic

I used to think the “magic” happens when someone physically puts a sticky note on the board as their promise. Now I know the magic actually lies in building a team that works together with honest and effective communication.  Every team is going to miss promises. Unforeseen conditions and human error have always been a part of this industry.  How we manage that is where we have hit a crossroad. We can either run a job through emotional manipulation or by having data-driven conversations. Constantly assessing performance with an understanding that we are all aligned with the common goal to maximize profit.

But what about the people who don’t care about being a team player?  I admit, some people simply will not come around. However, they are more the exception than the rule, and I am willing to bet their days as a legitimate player in this industry are numbered. Have one on your project? Fine, remove them from your collaborative planning equation, but understand that most want to belong to a successful team.

Where does the argument for analog vs. digital come in? Easy. With Touchplan, you can have data-driven conversations with people about performance and project objectives. The inputs are captured as a part of your normal planning and communication process, and you can instantly make them valuable.  If you are serious about improving your existing process, you will have to account for the time it takes to collect the data required. Everyone’s time is valuable, and the more time we allow for forward-thinking and planning vice manual data entry, the better.  Be sure to include time savings from handling information in your ROI assessment when considering a software solution. It might pay for itself just by cutting out time spent after meetings in Excel, let alone improved productivity through a better workflow.

Get the Plan to the Field 

So, how do we get information from our planning session to the place and time where value is created?  Some people have photographic memories and can remember in perfect detail what was discussed during the meeting. For the rest of us, we must have a portable reference. Notebooks are great, but they don’t automatically update nor make our data useful. This is where software like Touchplan comes in. It packages the work plan into a user-friendly interface that leaves no room for ambiguity.  We take the meeting with us to the field in our pocket.

My experience with an analog system quickly exposed opportunities for process improvement. I clung to sticky notes on the board for as long as I could but found that going all-digital with planning and communicating look-aheads was much more efficient.  Keep the benefit of collaboration in your weekly work plan meetings and daily huddles by providing a means for concise, visual communication, but don’t sweat it if there isn’t a sticky note in the room.  You can build a culture of continuous improvement and teamwork by establishing a routine of effective communication and data analysis, which leads to project success.

Stay tuned for part two of Andrew’s post on moving to digital planning. To see other content by Andrew be sure to read Tracking Repetitive Scopes Made Easier.

Project Production Management: Use Non-Repetitive Work for Your First Takt Plan (Part 8)

( By Hal Macomber and George Hunt, Lead – Pre-Sales/Sales Engineering Touchplan) Today we’ll show you how to develop a takt plan for non-repetitive work. (Repetitive work has more challenges.)

We use a typical pattern that gathers information about the sequence of operations, durations, crew sizes, and batch size.

Sequence the Work to Understand the Range of Trade Capabilities

We start by learning what it will take to meet the milestone for a particular phase of work. It will be different for different trades. We design the initial planning to uncover the obstacles to achieving flow.

  1. Identify the milestone conditions of satisfaction — doneness criteria — for the area or location of the work. This area or location should be one of the non-recurring spaces on the project (i.e. lobby, common space)
  2. Start from the intended completion date and work backward as we do with pull plans.
  3. For every operation, have the trade partners identify on a work ticket
  1. The specific process they will perform
  2. The smallest crew size that is reasonable
  3. The minimum duration they need for the operation (smaller is better)

You now have a description of the flow of work and the range of crew sizes and durations the trade partners think they need.

 

Now, Establish a Takt and Scale Capacities

  1. Find the smallest crew that can complete the most work in the least amount of time or the operation that will be the bottleneck for the area.
  2. Scale the other crews to match the takt (pace) of the fastest smallest crew or bottleneck.

Undoubtedly, when you scale up, you won’t get round numbers. A trade that needed just under three people to do work in two days may need 5.33 people to do it in one day. Taking longer doesn’t meet takt. Rounding up capacity makes the trade less productive. Neither is acceptable. So, what do we do?

 

Balance and Buffer the Work

  1. Find the imbalances. The rule of thumb is to round up the capacity. However, you could look for an improvement that would unload the onsite work to prefabrication, kitting, or operations improvements to reduce the capacity requirements to meet the pace.
  2. Identify workable backlog (ready but not currently needed work that won’t create problems for other trades when performed early) for partial crew members to work on while others complete the takt period’s work.

You now have the plan for one non-repeating flow unit that will maintain flow without negatively impacting trade partner productivity.

Install Practices to Maintain Control

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.

John Lennon, Beautiful Boy, quoting Allen Sanders, Readers Digest, 1957

Takt requires commitments from all trade partners to their “customers,” other trade partners who follow their work, to get the job done in the established takt. There’s no learning curve on an operation-by-operation basis for non-repetitive work. Get it done, else the following trade may have no place to work. Making work ready and managing your promises are the essential practices for achieving and sustaining flow.

We make work ready when we remove all the roadblocks to starting and finishing work as promised. That includes have the resources — tools, equipment, material, skilled team members, and safe working conditions — to perform the work as planned. Still, life — unexpected circumstances and variation — will appear.

So, have an end-of-day stand-up meeting among the last planners (usually foremen) for the operations underway. At that meeting the last planners report complete to their “customers.” They recommit to their following promises. They ask for help and offer help to keep the flow going. And when that is not possible, they replan the work.

Takt Is a Journey of Learning

There are a few keys to succeeding with takt.

  • Follow the four production laws.
  • Status the work on a timely basis.
  • Take care of your “customer” while you take care of yourself.
  • Use performance data to improve your planning practices.
  • Embrace a mood for learning.

Takt looks like an advanced practice for some people. It’s been around for almost 100 years. While CPM got the attention of the industry rather than takt, there is no better way to design production consistent with production laws than to use takt. And use the Last Planner System of Production Control® to pull it together as a coherent system.

You can contact George at [email protected] to learn more about how Touchplan helps teams successfully embrace takt planning and control. If you missed last week’s post be sure to read, Pace Construction to Bring Sanity to Your Construction Project.

Project Production Management: Pace Construction to Bring Sanity to Your Construction Project (Part 7)

(By Hal Macomber and George Hunt, Lead – Pre-Sales/Sales Engineering Touchplan) We’ve learned not to ignore production laws when we plan our projects. There is one approach that we should all be starting with as we plan. It’s takt, a German word borrowed by the Japanese, meaning beat, rhythm, or pace. The intent is to establish a consistent rate for performing all operations for a work phase.  Ideally, the speed is set based on the desired milestone completion for the phase and project.

Pacing production brings the four production laws together.

  • A constant pace removes variation.
  • We set the pace based on the smallest practical batch of work.
  • The bottleneck operation(s) will control the pace.
  • We avoid delays resulting from high capacity utilization and variation.

Pacing production has been a central idea in the Lean construction community since 1999 when Dr. Iris D. Tommelein, Director of the Project Production Systems Laboratory, UC Berkely, authored a white paper for the Lean Construction Institute. In February 2020, at the annual Design Forum, Iris declared,

“Takt planning applies to all projects.
No exceptions including non-repetitive (sequential) work.”

Not only do we agree with Iris, but Hal’s been using takt on projects since 1999. We haven’t seen any evidence to hint at an exception to Iris’s rule. Furthermore, takt, under different names, has been used at least as far back as the construction of the Empire State Building, which only took 13½ months to complete.

We will explore takt in-depth in the next eight blog posts. Takt plans look like this.

Notice the stair-step approach. You saw that in the blog post on batch sizing. When setting the takt time (pace), we start with one day to get the shortest phase plan. One day may not be possible for all operations in a phase plan without making accommodations. For example, teams may need to examine the steps in their process to distinguish what is value-adding and necessary to perform at the installation location. All other work steps are candidates for moving offline. For instance,

  • Don’t unpackage material at the work site if someone could do that beforehand.
  • Don’t mobilize and demobilize tools and materials if they can be on a cart that moves with the workers as they go from one flow unit to another.
  • Don’t measure, cut, assemble and coat in the workspace if that could be moved off-site.

The aim for achieving flow is to install, install, and install. Remember, this matters most for those operations that exceed the desired takt — the bottlenecks.

The usual ways trades work may not be conducive to a consistent short takt. The way we contract the trades contributes to that.  While balanced work is essential, we often contract with one trade without considering the desired paces of the work phases. Remembering that flow is our goal, we must make a fundamental shift from my work to our work. It’s a shift that starts with treating the performers of the next operation as “my customer.” And, it requires that I respect the performers’ work that came before me. It is not hard to do. In too many situations, we just aren’t trying to do it.

We get the best results from prefabrication or offsite construction when making those decisions early in the project’s design. Takt is similar. Have a workshop with key trades during preconstruction to collaboratively explore the opportunities for pacing.

Two days ago, George and Hal taught an “Introduction to Takt Planning and Control, Making the most of your Last Planner System® Projects” for the LCI New England Community of Practice. We will teach it again later this summer and at the LCI Annual Lean Design and Construction Congress in Phoenix in October.

If you missed our last blog, be sure to read Flow When you Can – Pull When you Can’t – Stop Pushing, and for more information on Lean planning check out Skip the Stickies and Learn LPS Digitally.

Project Production Management: Flow When You Can — Pull When You Can’t — Stop Pushing (Part 6)

(By Hal Macomber with Adam Hoots, Lean Enthusiast Construction ACHE Solutions) In the last four posts, we explored the principles or laws that universally govern production systems. Neither the construction industry nor associated academia introduce, let alone teach, production system design and management. Consequently, we rely on the experience and good judgment of successful senior people to guide the way. Typically these are the hard lessons that the most successful builders have “learned by experience.” These production laws are the keys to establishing flow on a project.

So, how did we learn about project production management? It started with a fellowship for a young academic visiting Stanford in 1992. Lauri Koskela, now Professor of Construction and Project Management, noticed what was happening in Freemont, CA at NUMMI, a partnership between Toyota and GM. He wrote the first paper that proposed the “new production principles” apply to design and construction. A year later, academics from several universities convened for the first annual International Group for Lean Construction. This year will mark the 29th conference.

Flow is the goal of all production systems.

We also learned from the Lean Construction Institute, many books on Toyota and other Lean companies. But, unfortunately, we also mislearned and misunderstood. That includes Hal and many of his contemporaries. Let’s take the five Lean thinking principles as an example. Jim Womack and Dan Jones proposed that we could be Lean if we adopted these principles:

  • Define value from the customer’s perspective and in their language
  • Organize the value-adding work as a value stream
  • Make the workflow
  • Pull work through the value stream
  • Pursue perfection

What Jim and Dan underplayed and many of us failed to understand is that all five principles must be operating. Yes, we intend to design production systems to deliver what we promise our customers. And then it breaks down. Whether we describe the physical work of construction or the intangible work of architecture and engineering, we spend far too little time exploring the value stream for the senior promises we make to the customer (client). Flow turns out to be the goal of the production system, not just one of the principles. That is a big misunderstanding. Flow when you can; pull when you can’t. Yet, our practice of customarily pushing work into the system makes flow unlikely. Stop pushing! And perfection? We won’t get the production system design right, but we can be better every day ONLY IF we embrace learning and experimentation as our practice.

Don’t mess with production laws. You will not win.

Womack and Jones failed to show that the whole system must change. Tinkering around at the edges has little to no impact. Sampling from the Lean buffet of tools, methods, and practices might make you feel good, but results are insignificant. We will only achieve the benefits of production system design when we start with the purpose of the system. Flow is the goal of all production systems. But, it is only possible when the production system conforms to the four basic production laws. And, that is not enough. We must replace many of our current practices with new practices to operate in accord with those laws.

In the second blog post, you saw that no improvement anywhere in the system improves throughput unless we expand the bottleneck.

You understand via the third post that variation in operations performance compounds (exponentially) with dependency.

The fourth blog post illustrated how operating a production system to high utilization levels significantly delays project completion.

In the fifth post, you witnessed that projects are surprisingly shorter when we embrace small-batch construction.

These are the laws of production. Yet, what do we do on an everyday basis? We often act by following critical path thinking. In other words, we ignore, do not understand, or are oblivious to production laws. 

Stop pushing doesn’t mean to stop encouraging people to go further. Instead, in production management, pushing means starting work on a flow unit without regard for the availability of resources to continue to work on that flow unit. Doing work when it isn’t required is also considered pushing. Taking people away from work in process interrupts flow and increases variation. Working ahead unnecessarily takes on more risk. Either case of pushing is terrible for the project.

Fun fact. Hal was fired as a consultant on a nuclear power plant upgrade project because he advised the team to throttle back starting work (contrary to the master schedule) while achieving increasing throughput in the system. Why? We weren’t meeting the planned start dates in the master schedule. We couldn’t do it. The work was not ready to do it. The capacity wasn’t available to do it. Yet, the commonsense among the scheduling community governed managing the project. The result? The project fell further behind when they went back to launching work according to planned start dates.

Don’t mess with production laws. You will not win.

We will show how you can design your production system to conform to the four production laws and dramatically get more accomplished in shorter periods and with less risk in future blog posts.

The blog post title comes from conversations with Jason Schroeder, author of Elevate Construction Takt Planning.

If you missed last week’s post please read Bigger Batches Create Longer Projects. For more information on the Laws of Production, please check out Lean Training: If You Can Increase Project Profitability by 20%, You Can Increase It by 50%.

Project Production Management: Bigger Batches Create Longer Projects (Part 5)

(By Hal Macomber and Colin Milberg, Principal ASKM Associates)

Our common sense tells us the more work we get started then the sooner we finish. One common practice is to give a framer a whole floor of a building thinking that makes them more productive. We think productivity is equivalent to speed. It’s not.

Professor John Little, Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, did the proof (Little’s Law) that relates time in a system (like the time to complete all steps on a floor) with processing time (like the speed crews complete a floor) and the internal arrival of work (like the amount of floor space started but not finished). The implication for construction is that the more frequently we hand over space from one trade to the next, i.e., the less stagger between trades, the sooner the project will finish.

It is our moral imperative to design our construction production process to our smallest practical batch sizes. Otherwise, we are squandering our client’s resources. And … we reduce our risk in the process.

Let’s use a simple example. We have a small project. There are five floors in the building. Five operations need to be done on each floor by five different trades. Each trade is staffed to do their work on a floor in five days. We’ll start with the situation where each trade hands off a floor each week. The first trade A finishes floor 1 on week 1 and then moves to floor 2 at the beginning of week 2. That makes floor 1 available for trade B on week two. By week 5, trade A is working on the fifth floor, and trade E starts on the first floor. Week-by-week each trade moves up the building finishing their work in five weeks. Trade A finishes in the fifth week. Trade E finishes four weeks later in week nine.

Now let’s consider how long the project would take if we hand over 20% of the floor each day. On day two the 2nd trade starts, and by day 5 all trades are working which is more than three weeks earlier than the above larger handoff or batch approach. When the handoff or batch size is a whole floor it takes nine weeks. When the batch size is cut to 20% of the floor it takes 29 days cutting the time by 35%!

Calculating the Benefit of Small Batch Production

We derive an equation for determining the duration of a phase of work from Little’s Law. In the following equation [ Work In Process] / Throughput = Cycle Time, where: Work In Process is the maximum number of areas or flow units being worked on in a given moment; Throughput is the speed of the crews shown as the number of areas in a batch divided by the time required for a crew to complete the batch, and Cycle Time is the amount of time for all operations to complete one area.

[(Number of Flow Units – Batch Size) + (Number of Operations * Batch Size)] / Throughput = Total Project Duration.

First, let’s use the above example. There are 25 flow units (work areas that can be started and finished). In the first case, a trade does a batch of five flow units before turning over space to another trade. There are five operations (trades) performed on each flow unit. The throughput time (the time the flow unit is in an operation) is 5 flow units in 5 days or 1 unit per day.

One week stagger [(25 – 5)) + (5 * 5)] * 1 / 1 = 45 days

One day stagger   [(25 – 1)) + (5 * 1)] * 1 / 1 = 29 days

Savings 16 days, about 35% shorter!

Second case: 18-story university residence hall, alternate floors had different layouts. The work involved interior framing through finishing. There were 26 operations. We proposed splitting into two flow units per floor with different layouts, but similar square footage. The GC planned to turn over one floor per week (5 days). We proposed to turn over one flow unit (half-floor) every two days. Notice the flow units increase because we made the space smaller.

One week stagger [(18 – 1) + (26 * 1)] * 5 / 1 = 215 days

Two day stagger   [(36 – 1) + (26 * 1)] * 2 / 1 = 122 days

Savings: 93 days, about 43% shorter!

Let’s consider going smaller, then smaller again. First ¼ of a floor, then ⅛.

One day stagger   [(72 – 1) + (26 * 1)] * 1 / 1 = 97 days (doubled the flow units)

Savings: 25 days, about 20% shorter!

Half day stagger   [(144 – 1) + (26 * 1)] * 0.5 / 1 = 84.5 days (doubled the flow units, again)

Savings: 12.5 days, about 13% shorter!

Quarter day stagger   [(288 – 1) + (26 * 1)] * 0.25 / 1 = 78.5 days (doubled the flow units, again)

Savings: 6 days, about 7% shorter!

The time savings from the change in batching from 18 flow units to 288 flow units resulted in savings from 215 days to 78.5 days. A whopping 63% reduction in the cycle time!

Think about this …

How much money can we save for our clients when we significantly reduce project durations?

How much revenue or value can we produce for our clients when we deliver projects earlier?

It is our moral imperative to design our construction production process to our smallest practical batch sizes. Otherwise, we are squandering our client’s resources. And … we reduce our risk in the process.

Implications for Phase Planning

Projects take more time the larger the batch of work in a physical area that is exclusively assigned. Cut the batch size and the project will get shorter as long as the workflows without interruption from one trade to the next. Notice there is a diminishing return as you continue to cut batch size.

We use a rule of thumb to start with a batch size that can be done reliably by all trades in one day. Scale up the number of flow units from that if necessary to accommodate crew sizing. We’ll cover more on this in upcoming blog posts.

Not only are projects shorter with small batches but quality, safety, and workplace cleanliness improve. Of course, all of this depends on being able to execute the plan. Initially, there will be bumps in the road. Commit yourselves to learn from mistakes and the project will get better fast.

Connect with Colin on LinkedIn

If you missed last week’s post please check out Delays Increase Exponentially as Utilization Increases. For additional insights on Project Production Management please read Takt Time Planning and Laws of Production: Getting the Most out of LPS.

Why Percent Plan Complete (PPC) is Critical To Construction Productivity

Touchplan’s Insights allows owners, construction executives, project managers and superintendents to review accurate, real-time project metrics all the way down to the field level, enabling them to proactively manage and mitigate scheduling risks for a single project or across a portfolio of projects. The data measured provides a fantastic opportunity to identify areas for improvement and head off problems before they get big.

More specifically the data that is captured via the Percent Plan Complete (PPC) feature in Touchplan makes it apparent to all the members of a construction project team that various elements are being tracked allowing all to see any trends or issues and make changes to mitigate them.

Right & Wrong Ways to Utilize Data

PPC can also serve as a reminder to all the need to update their completed work in Touchplan. Prior to technology tools like Touchplan, construction teams would do a great job planning their work, they would promise their work and then do the work. But come to the end of the project there was no “formal review process”. Think back to your college days. You would spend an enormous amount of time researching, writing, and editing a term paper but then imagine if you did not have it graded. How can one expect to understand what is going well and what needs to be improved?

The construction teams that take data analysis to the next level want to get the grade back on the paper and then understand where they can improve. They pay attention to the variances; they pay attention to the why’s and they make adjustments that will improve the overall work moving forward. One of the benefits of this process is that making small changes can remove similar mistakes in the future. Again using a simple analogy of walking out your door, and having to step over a bunch of the kids’ toys every day. If you make the simple adjustment of moving the kids’ toys to a designated spot or give them a bin to put them in then you no longer have to step over them and avoid things like tripping and spraining your ankle.

Construction teams that use PPC data incorrectly, use it as a battering ram, or, a ruler to reprimand their trades for things like incomplete work. They don’t see the data for what it truly is –  a diagnostic tool and improvement metric. Also, they are not looking deeper for the real answers, the whys? A trade may have fallen short due to delays beyond their immediate control not because they are slow. It’s important to peel back the onion or ask yourself why? By doing this you will be able to identify the real causes that can be found through accurate data. If construction specialty trades see PPC as a watchdog looking to spring upon incorrect work then they will not invest the time to use it the way it is meant and valuable information is lost. In actuality, the trades and especially the foremen can be one of the biggest benefactors of PPC. The more comfortable they become with PPC the more it will allow them to bid and run future projects more effectively.

Measuring PPC Can Lead to Better Reliability

At the end of the day, it’s important to remember that measuring PPC does not automatically lead to working faster or more efficiently. It provides access to multiple reports within one dashboard and it is also customizable, providing users the opportunity to remove unforeseen factors such as weather, early finishes, or uncontrollable delays. Think about it like not just looking at one gauge that says you have half a tank; you need to look at all of your gauges and absorb that information, and then your overall knowledge is increased twofold.

What is important for construction teams to realize is that if you measure PPC and take it seriously and try to improve your processes from the data, the entire construction team is going to become more reliable. It’s more important to keep the mentality that slow and steady not only will win the race and get you there on time; it’ll also reduce stress, headaches, and avoid a lot of people scrambling around to meet the deliverables at the end of a project.

Learn More About PPC & Insights at our Webinar

If you would like to learn more about how to best use PPC to improve jobsite productivity, sign up for our webinar Using Real-Time Analytics to Maximize Productivity which will be taking place on June 22.

Project Production Management: Delay’s Increase Exponentially as Utilization Increases (Part 4)

(By Hal Macomber and George Hunt) Project teams have a tough job pursuing high productivity for workgroups while maintaining and improving flow on the job. Oftentimes in the pursuit to keep all of the resources on-site “busy”, we end up taking actions that hurt the overall project flow and ultimately create more problems.  Niklas Modig and Par Ahlstrom do a good job of pointing to this paradox in This Is Lean, Resolving the Efficiency Paradox. In short, focusing on flow over-utilizing resources, actually makes it possible to free up more resources. For project-based production, the paradox is resolved by making work ready for people and people ready for work. Almost. Variation and high resource utilization on our projects combine to make this task difficult for our teams. George and I wrote about the compounding of variation with dependence two weeks ago. This week, we take on how high utilization in the presence of high variation leads to project delays and the actions and countermeasures we can take. 

Production Science of Utilization

In the 1960s, Sir John Kingman created an equation that approximates waiting time (delay) as a function of variation, utilization and processing time. None of us are likely to use the equation in designing and managing a project phase production plan. Knowing how the variables interact, however, is quite important. Understanding the tradeoff between the three can significantly help us design our workflows to give us the results we want.

Consider rush-hour traffic. During that time there is high utilization of the available and fixed road capacity. We also experience two kinds of variation. We see people driving at different speeds (processing time) leading to other drivers changing lanes (arrival variation). We also see drivers entering and merging with traffic at different intervals (arrival variation). Since there is high dependence among the drivers, the variation compounds for those up the road, requiring them to slow down and sometimes stop. The same roadway at a less busy time of day, (lower capacity utilization) has far more ability to absorb the processing and arrival variation of the drivers.

It turns out that delay increases exponentially as capacity utilization and variation increases. Highway engineers use various countermeasures to minimize sources of variation. They pace arrivals at on-ramps with stop-and-go lights. They limit movement from the left-most lanes to minimize arrival variation from lane departures. They also post minimum speed limits for the left-most lanes.

Project Production System Implications

We have many sources of variation on our projects that amplify the severity of high utilization: 

  • Processing time varies from one crew to another as well as within crews.
  • Crew sizes may vary from one day to the next as people take time off, get sick, or are assigned to different projects to handle emergent work.
  • The workspace and conditions (weather) varies.
  • The work itself varies. 
  • Without attention, the batch size varies.
  • The start of work varies from week to week, depending on what the master schedule says.
  • Quality varies, requiring rework.
  • Material availability varies, requiring go-backs.
  • Equipment reliability and availability vary.

Utilization increases as variation increases because the same people who are doing work need to respond to all of the variation. The technical term for this is a “mess.”

What Can We Do?

We can take two kinds of action: reduce sources of variation and adopt countermeasures for high utilization. Depending on the conditions of our projects, we may be able to do one more readily than the other. Our aim is to keep work flowing while maintaining good productivity. Starting with variation, making work ready for people and people ready for work is essential for eliminating the arrival class of variation. Couple that with making reliable promises between trade partners, and the impact of variation can begin to be controlled. High reliability of completions leads to high reliability of starting work as planned. Touchplan Insights helps with both. You see how well you are making work-ready with the constraints performance. And percent promises complete is prominently displayed.

We also need to accommodate for system variation. We do this principally with stand-by capacity coupled with workable backlog. Standby capacity lets a trade’s crews work at nearly 100% utilization knowing that the standby workers are ready to stop what they are doing, or never start doing something, to be available to crews for part of the day. What are they doing when they are not needed? They are doing work that isn’t needed in the current week, but is ready (unconstrained) AND doesn’t create a sequencing problem for the downstream trade,  “the customer” of the work. This is called workable backlog. Workable backlog is identified for each trade every week during their weekly work planning conversation. The trade customer must agree to declaring future work as workable or it doesn’t go on the list.

The last countermeasure is to track units in place as compared to the crew size. This is done on a trade-by-trade basis. They’ll have targets for the promise period. Quickly identifying variances from those targets is essential. Have trades status their work just before or at the end-of-day stand-up meeting in the field. Share any variation that occured and take necessary follow-up action. Touchplan Go makes it easy to always have up-to-date status.

Making work flow is the senior goal for all production systems. Understanding how a high resource utilization relates to variation on our projects, and vice versa, is a great first step. As the authors of This Is Lean say in the title, there is usually a paradox between flow efficiency and resource efficiency. You now know how to resolve that paradox. The time to act is now!

If you missed last week’s post please read Bottlenecks Rule – Make It The Policy. Analytics can play a key role to help identify project delays and Touchplan Insights can help identify those challenges. Learn more by signing up for our webinar Using Real-Time Analytics to Maximize Productivity which will be taking place on June 22.

Memorial Day: A Time to Celebrate; A Time to Remember

Memorial Day also marks the unofficial start to Summer. We await this weekend to welcome in warmer weather and take time to step away from daily jobs and other responsibilities to celebrate with families and friends. We fire up the grill, tell stories, and count our blessings. We should do this, as it is a much-needed, healthy break after a long winter and spring. However, Today marks something far more important.

Allow me to share a statistic with you; 1,354,664*. That is an estimate of the number of Americans who have given their lives in defense of our nation, dating back to the Revolutionary War.  Every single one of them had a family, close friends, and a story. 

I am proud to say that I am presently an officer and reservist in the United States Marine Corps and served in active duty positions overseas. One of the most significant aspects of our military is its ability to bring seemingly diverse people together under a single cause. The guy from Lubbock, Texas who tried to ride the floor buffer in the barracks. The dude from Brooklyn, New York who got lost in land nav and had to be found by instructors.  Even the kid from Columbia, MO, who always had an unusual way of easing the tension or making guys laugh in formation. 

All come from vastly different backgrounds but are united under one purpose, and oddly enough become best friends. And I can say that with the highest level of confidence, as the aforementioned knuckleheads are still some of my closest and dearest friends.

Today at 3 PM local time, as with every Memorial Day,  there will be a nationwide moment of remembrance. We at Touchplan are grateful for the sacrifice of our fallen heroes and continue to support our nation’s military. So today at 3, perhaps take that moment at whatever festivity you are attending and ask your friends to join together to honor those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom.

 For those who have already given and those who are yet to pay the ultimate price, we honor by living the best lives we can.  Take time to remember, and keep moving forward.

Project Production Management: Bottlenecks Rule — Make it the Policy (Part 3)

(By Hal Macomber, EVP Touchplan and Terri Erickson,) All processes and projects have bottlenecks or constraints. A physical bottleneck determines the maximum rate at which the process flows. Increasing the size of a bottle without changing the size of the bottleneck has no impact on flow. Yet, our everyday experience of bottlenecks can be one of surprise, dismay, or frustration. Let’s shift our relationship to them by taking charge of the bottlenecks.

Background

Terri and Hal studied Eli Goldratt’s work on the Theory of Constraints (ToC) made famous by his book, The Goal, An Ongoing Process of Improvement first published in 1982. Terri teaches ToC in a master’s level course for Engineering Management. Hal has written about ToC for nearly 20 years.

The Goal and ToC were key to the development of the theory and practice of Lean Construction. Greg Howell discovered the book in the 1990s. He was inspired by the story of the boy scout hike and campfire lesson to create the Parade of Trades® simulation, the essential way people in the construction industry are learning about constraints, variation, and compounding effects in project-based production systems.

Clarke Ching, a serious Goldratt student and Agile project expert, has been writing to make Goldratt’s lessons more available and understandable to a larger audience. His book, The Bottleneck Rules: How to Get More Done (When Working Harder isn’t Working), is used in study-action teams in the design and construction industry.

When you see your first bottleneck, it will hit you like a good movie plot twist does, and you will wonder, “How on earth did I not see that until now?” You’ll shake your head in disbelief when you realize that something so seemingly harmless has been sitting there, in plain sight, sucking the life out of your workplace and nobody noticed. 

The good news is that you’re not only going to learn to see bottlenecks — you’ll also learn how to tame them and manage them. Your workplace will speed up and, at the same time, calm down. Taming bottlenecks is easy when you can see them.

Clarke Ching, New Zealand, The Bottleneck Rules

Use Bottlenecks for the Benefit of Project Production Systems

Project-based production systems are often short-lived. Pull planning is one common way teams are designing their phase plans. Unfortunately, even people who have been introduced to Lean Construction, pull planning, and bottlenecks don’t often explicitly consider what operation (activity) will limit or control production flow, let alone strategically locate the control point. Consequently, just out of plain sight, the bottleneck does what it always does; it controls the flow through that phase of work. That might impact the phase milestone, or not. If it does, then firefighting ensues.

Alternatively, let’s make a conscious decision when designing a phase of work to place the bottleneck where it is useful for controlling the flow or throughput of the process. Consider the capacity limitations of each operation. You might find that the pace of the lowest capacity limitation is sufficient to support the milestone target. If not, look for alternative means to accomplish the limiting work. Offsite construction, kitting, shift work, etc may help. Pick a visible operation to set the pace for the phase. That operation’s capacity should match the desired pace. All other trades or workgroups adjust their work and team size to match the desired pace. Remember, the throughput of the whole process can’t be more than the throughput of the bottleneck. Any operation that tries to perform at a higher rate will not result in overall gains for the phase milestone.

It helps to place the pacing operation where there are buffers available. We commonly use two types of buffers on projects — time and capacity buffers. Time buffers, known as “float” in scheduling jargon, are best placed at the end of a phase just before the milestone. Time buffers are consumed when slippages occur. Daily overtime and Saturday work are examples of capacity buffers. While our industry uses these buffers, it comes with large risks and detrimental impacts on the team members. Longer hours often negatively increase safety, quality, and productivity. Worse, families are seriously impacted when mom or dad is repeatedly not available for family responsibilities. Smart leaders do not put the quality of life of “our most important assets” at risk.

The better option, use stand-by capacity coupled with workable backlog when designing the phase production plan – especially with pace-setting bottleneck activities. Stand-by capacity is used to fill the gap between the daily average capacity needed and the daily spikes and dips in demand. We set that extra capacity for all crews of the same trade. If plumbing is running four crews with a total of 15 people, they might take care of a large percentage of the daily ups and downs as long as flexing happens between the crews. Alternatively, they may plan for one or two additional people for partial days a few days each week — standby capacity. The rest of the time they are doing work that is ready but not needed until a later time AND will not cause problems for other teams when performed out of sequence, like unpacking product or prefabbing components — workable backlog. We’ll write more about this in future blog posts.

Five Types of Bottlenecks

Clarke Ching distinguishes five usual bottlenecks we encounter on our projects.

  1. Wild Bottlenecks are often hidden and they are either unmanaged or poorly managed.
  2. Tamed Bottlenecks don’t have as much capacity as we would like but they are visible and are easily managed.
  3. A Deliberate bottleneck is designed to deliberately limit the flow through a system – e.g. the bottleneck of a wine bottle or a Tabasco sauce bottle.
    1. Bottles have necks to control the speed of the content as it flows out.
    2. A simple place to put a deliberate bottleneck is at the start of a process so that we choke, restrict or throttle the flow of work into the system so the entire system runs at the speed of that control point.
  4. Right stuff bottlenecks — Are we being effective? Are we working on the right stuff?
  5. Right place bottlenecks — Are they where they are supposed to be?

We wrote about wild and deliberate bottlenecks. Taming bottlenecks is done with the FOCCCUS process (ToC Focusing mechanism). It’s a step-by-step approach for identifying and systematically improving the situation so the bottleneck is working FOR the process. The steps are Find, Optimize, Coordinate, Collaborate, Curate, Upgrade, and Start again. Learn more from Clarke’s very brief and readable book.

Key Takeaways

Remember, you and your team are responsible for the design of the production system … this includes strategic placement of the bottleneck. Take that opportunity seriously.

  • A bottleneck ALWAYS exists — “not having a bottleneck” is not possible — just because you can’t see your bottleneck, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist
  • Do not be a victim of your project’s bottlenecks
  • Use bottlenecks as a way to pace the project and control the project
  • Place your bottleneck in a location where you maximize buffers available
  • There is a probabilistic nature to the whole thing — ACCEPT that there will be times when the bottleneck is working at maximum capacity and other times when it’s not. (more on this later)
  • Life still happens — stay on the lookout for previously hidden bottlenecks
  • Develop work agreements with your project team so that “bottleneck” activities take priority over other activities.
  • This isn’t just about finding the bottleneck this is about DESIGNING the bottleneck(s)
  • Shift language from “bottleneck” to “control points” — bottlenecks lead to victims, control points lead to empowerment. . .
    • Develop multiple control points — NEVER have EVERYTHING be a control point. Starting work, bottleneck work, and finishing work are great control points.
    • Control points should be actively monitored, managed, and improved.

Let’s relentlessly pursue flow by reducing our Project Team’s experiences of surprise, dismay, and frustration by shifting our relationship with bottlenecks and taking charge of them.

If you missed last week’s post please take a moment to read Beware, Variation Compounds with Dependence Data can play a key role to help identify bottlenecks. Learn how Touchplan Insights can help.

College Students Prepare For Their First Construction Job With Hands-On ConTech Training

Graduation season is upon us, and with it, many members of the Class of 2021 will be seeking jobs in the “real world.” Students who learn more about their desired profession or even get some hands-on experience usually tend to have a leg up when competing for positions. That is becoming even more prevalent in the construction industry were more general contractors are using a variety of construction software products and students must quickly learn to use these tools in their new jobs.

Touchplan is lending a hand to help prepare college students studying construction management by giving them exposure to our product as part of their construction planning classes. Touchplan is currently being utilized as a part of the Construction Management Curriculum at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and Colorado State University.

Professors from both institutions have seen the value in exposing their students to real-world construction technology tools that they will most likely be using in their day-to-day jobs after accepting a position with a general contractor, specialty trade, or owner’s project manager. 

A More Hands-On Approach To Construction Management And Advanced Scheduling Training

Andrew Kline, an Assistant Professor in the Construction Management Department at Cal Poly SLO and a construction professional, started the Advanced Scheduling Class about a year ago so students could be introduced to a more hands-on approach to scheduling that would reflect how they would see it in the field. 

“I started the Advanced Scheduling class as I wanted to show students pull planning based on my own experience in the industry,” said Kline. “A student of mine introduced me to Touchplan when they got to use it while working as a summer intern for a major contractor. We were able to get it implemented as part of the class and now use it in three to four different assignments throughout the quarter, so students can see the actual jobsite approach to scheduling.” 

Kline added, “I have found Touchplan beneficial to help students grasp the overall phasing of construction. As someone who worked in construction and utilized pull planning by using sticky notes, it was always difficult to understand all the relationships and phases of a project. Touchplan helps students understand the way it’s scheduled on the jobsite and how it can be changed on the fly, to adjust to certain milestones.”

Remote Learning Spurs A New Approach In Teaching Pull Planning

Christofer Harper, professor of a senior-level construction scheduling class at Colorado State University, came upon Touchplan due to the Covid-19 Pandemic. Part of this senior-level construction and scheduling class involves a lab component where the students, after being assigned an individual component of a construction project, must then come together to work on a pull planning session, so they can see how all components work together. These used to be traditional pull planning sessions that utilized whiteboards and sticky notes. When the Covid Crisis hit, in-person lab sessions would not be possible, so Harper had to come up with an alternative.

“My TA, Shantanu Kumar, did some digging and found Touchplan as a potential [tool] that could help us supplement the in-person planning activity and we began using it this past Fall (2020) and we were really impressed with it, as were the students,” said Harper. “Touchplan emulated pretty closely what we have done before when we were in the classroom. It worked so well in the fall semester we used it again this spring and it was another great success for us.”

While Harper has taught his class via the traditional method of pull planning with sticky notes on walls, he said he would most likely incorporate Touchplan’s technology again. 

“I think we will continue to use Touchplan just because we are using more and more technology tools,” said Harper. “Even when Covid is done and students are able to meet in the computer lab, they could just have Touchplan on the screen and work on it in the lab as opposed to going up to the whiteboard. It is the same effect and it’s cleaner, doing it in Touchplan. With sticky notes, you may not get the greatest handwriting and it can get messy after a while. Also if people are trying to take pictures, and you have a plan laid out across three whiteboards, you may not be able to read it, but in Touchplan, you’ve got it right there, students can save their work and they go back to any point in the project if they wanted to look at it. So I definitely see us continuing to use it.”

Exposure To Construction Technology Enhances Learning

The construction management curriculum is not just limited to Touchplan. Both Cal Poly and Colorado State are incorporating other software programs used by general contractors into their classes as they are seeing that the industry understands all the benefits that these tech tools have, as well as the efficiencies that they deliver. The industry is also seeing the value in the students getting exposed to this technology in the classroom. In addition to planning, students are getting exposure to work-related software for cost management and document management.

“We have some very good industry support here at Cal Poly and those industry partners have told us that it would be great if students were skilled at, or at least knew about some of the tools that are being used in the industry. So I think that was kind of a big push for us,” Kline added.

Students Apply Construction Management Software Experience To Find Jobs

Josselyn Verutti is a senior majoring in construction management at Cal Poly and has been able to be exposed to Touchplan in both her classwork as well as via an internship with a major general contractor in California. She has been able to take the knowledge she has gained in her classes, apply it to an internship opportunity, and already has a job opportunity waiting for her when she graduates.

“What’s great about the Construction Management program at Cal Poly is that its format is to learn by doing and the program does an amazing job with that via labs and all the other classes,” said Verutti. “The teachers also come with a lot of real-world experience in the construction industry, working in positions like project managers and project engineers so it’s great learning from those who have had a direct connection to the industry.”

Verutti feels that the exposure she received to construction technology products definitely prepared her to work an internship but also believes it has prepared her to hit the ground running when she starts her new job after graduation.

“Having the opportunity to use these programs at school is huge because even just using these programs for like a week or two prepared me for when I saw these programs in my internship. While I was still very rough on them, I had seen them, so it wasn’t a totally new experience and it made me look more knowledgeable to my superiors,” Veruitti added.

Interested In Using Touchplan In Your Classroom?

Touchplan is very much interested in continuing to work with academic institutions to help students better understand the rapidly evolving technologies that are advancing the construction industry. If you would like to learn more about opportunities to use Touchplan in your classroom you can read Bringing Touchplan to the Next Generation of Planners; or drop us a line at [email protected].