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In this twenty-minute session Touchplan’s Vice President of Professional Services, Michael Sullivan, covers how to divide a project into logical milestones that a team can feel confident in accomplishing. The webinar also explores how to develop a phase pull schedule (PPS) and define project deliverables and strategy, and includes explanations of handoff criteria, conditions of satisfaction and concentrated effort.

 

I caught up with Lean consultant Hal Macomber and the Director of Regen50 in Johannesburg, South Africa, Calayde Davey, while they were at LCI Congress 2018. We discussed what’s changed since they co-authored The Pocket Sensei, Mastering Lean Leadership in 2017, how Kaizen practices can be introduced to design as well as construction, and what they plan to cover in the book’s upcoming second volume. Our conversation has been lightly edited.

Continue reading “Lean Training: Bringing Kaizen to Design”

The construction industry has lagged for many years in achieving the productivity gains enabled in other industries by digitization and technology. While this trend has been changing more recently, forty percent of construction companies still rely on paper plans during projects. With a labor shortage that shows no signs of abating, companies will be relying on improvements to operational efficiency to maintain and grow their bottom lines.

Continue reading “Finish Ahead with Touchplan”

Katherine Van Adzin: Let’s talk about zero-punch-list projects!

Hal Macomber: Let’s begin this discussion by establishing Lean as an operating strategy that gives preference to flow efficiency over resource efficiency through continuous improvement that results in building the competence of people. If you’re giving preference to flow efficiency, anything that would interrupt flow is something that you want to attack. An “oops” anywhere along the way requires you to either stop and fix it or somebody needs to go find that you made a mistake someplace on your project and then you have to repair it. In all cases, something that we call a “punch list” item is a failure demand. [Ed. note: “failure demand” refers to a demand on someone’s time resulting from a failure of some kind.]

Continue reading “Lean Training: How to Run a Zero-Punch-List Project”

I sat down with Lean consultant Hal Macomber and Touchplan’s Vice President of Professional Services, Mike Sullivan, to get their thoughts on what changes for construction project teams when they implement project planning software like Touchplan. Their conversation has been condensed and slightly edited.

Continue reading “Lean Training: How Software Impacts Projects”

I sat down with Michael Carr, President of Touchplan, to discuss with Lean consultant Hal Macomber how to get more out of the Last Planner® System by viewing it as a Kaizen method. Our conversation has been condensed and slightly edited.

Katherine Van Adzin: Could you start by defining Kaizen?

Hal Macomber: Kaizen is generally referred to as just continuous improvement. The term means “Kai, change—Zen, better,” so that’s the term that is generally used, although it’s misused. The Japanese have two words for improving. One is Kaizen, the other is Kairyo. And Kairyo loosely translates as, “change something.” How are Kaizen and Kairyo different? Zen is used to describe people, and how people are. Kaizen is a change for the better in oneself. The way it’s practiced is through making improvements to something, but the attention of Kaizen is on oneself.

Very few people ever make the distinction that I’m making, they miss it altogether. They think that Kaizen is waste elimination, and that’s the fundamental way people talk about it. Particularly in manufacturing situations, but also in healthcare situations, they focus their efforts on the artifacts, or the process steps without any reflection on oneself.

When Kaizen is well practiced, when improvement shows up as Kaizen it includes reflection, and in reflection we learn. The term for that is Hansei (“hahn-say”). When you do Kaizen, you must have reflection. It’s a matter of, “I had a problem, I made a change, it got a little bit better,” and “How was I impacted by that? What did I learn from that?”

KV: How did you begin to view the Last Planner System® as a Kaizen method?

HM: The concept of the Last Planner System® as a Kaizen method first came to me five or six years ago when I was introduced to the Kanban Method. Kanban is a simple visual way of displaying work and what state in the process the work is. It’s done at a personal level and it’s done on a team, but people have mistaken just visually displaying work as Kanban. Kanban’s a visual improvement method for the planning and delivery of work.

Now, it’s generally not seen as a method that has its attention on the person. It’s got its attention on the process, but that too is a mistake because in the Kanban space in general there are three major reasons why people are doing Kanban. One is to take better care of the clients. Another is to take better care of the company. The third, which is usually expressed as the first reason, is to take better care of oneself and each other, including learning.

We can use the Last Planner System® as an improvement method. Many teams are doing that, but it’s more like improving things, improving the way we plan and promise work, or improving the way we hang wallboard. All of that’s possible when using the Last Planner System®, but to make it a Kaizen method what would we be doing? What’s the fundamental change that would be a change for the better of the people, or for the people that are participating in the system?

Michael, what’s your take so far on what I’ve said?

Michael Carr: When we first started modeling the Last Planner System® in the computer we had a debate internally that didn’t last too long. The debate had to do with the role of the computer. One premise was, “Well, a computer can actually optimize. It could find the more optimal solution, the better solution and share that.” On the flip side, we had people who interpreted the Last Planner System® as a system that self-improves, so that as you use it you start homing in on the optimal solution by virtue of the fact that you’re following this process.

Ultimately, we abandoned the idea of having the computer do a calculation to tell you how good of a Last Planner® schedule or plan you’d come up with, and instead focused on having the computer just enable the collaboration, the dialogue, and eliminate some of the grunt work associated with the Last Planner System® just to make it easier to do the process because the process in and of itself led to incremental improvements. The team learns how to work together, and the byproduct of that is they actually get the result as opposed to having a computer tell them what to do.

HM: I’m sure you’ve seen graphs where they compare where an organization’s performance is that tries to make long step function change versus everyday continuous improvement. The suggestion is always that the organization’s performance is better if you do a little bit better every single day.

That gets you ahead, but it doesn’t preclude step function change along the way. The idea of making everyday change, like everybody making everyday, small change is like taking a shot on goal. It’s not a big deal. Take another shot in hockey, take a shot on the goal. And whether or not you get the goal, the more shots you take the better you get at taking shots, and the more likely you’re going to get the goal.

That’s the analogy, but we’re leaving out the person. The whole conversation leaves out the person making the change. “What’s going on for that person?”

MC: Right.

HM: Now, for example, take the Toyota company. They say their purpose for being is not to make better transportation systems for people. Their purpose for being is to develop human potential.

This purpose goes unnoticed or is ignored. On any given day if you are looking on LinkedIn and you’re following the keyword “Lean,” you’re going to get all kinds of stuff about what people say Lean is and what it’s doing, and for the most part there’s no conversation about what’s happening to people. If there is, it’s purely incidental.

Jumping off from there, how is it that the Last Planner System® could be a Kaizen method? When Glenn Ballard and Greg Howell developed the Last Planner System® from the earliest days they had feedback loops, multiple feedback loops in the system. The current depiction goes from master scheduling to phase scheduling, to make ready planning, weekly work planning (the act of promising), and then daily commitment management. That’s the current way it’s described. There’s a result from each step in the process.

“Oh. I did something. This is what happened. How do I make it better?” In the act of making it better we get more competent at whatever that step in the process was.

We’re designing a Lean production system through pull planning. What’s the measure of a Lean production system? Work flows uninterrupted, or in other words, value is accumulated uninterrupted for a flow unit of whatever it is we’re doing.

MC: Right.

HM: The process, the kind of best practice today for designing for uninterrupted flow is called Takt time planning. You pull your project and then you Takt time plan it through the steps of the process. Most people stop pull planning once they’ve done a good job of sequencing work for the benefit of their customers and they think that’s done. It’s certainly much better than what we were doing before, but it doesn’t give you flow. These feedback loops for many project situations are poorly executed, or not executed.

MC: Yeah. I think that a lot of thought went into the Last Planner System® and it’s clear that the process is designed to—if you follow it—lead to a whole bunch of personal improvement. You’re better at planning, you’re better at identifying problems early and clearing things up. You’re better at sharing bad news early, you’re better at thinking together as a group and coming up with a novel solution. You’re better at really understanding how what you do impacts other folks.

There’s a lot there, but you’re absolutely right. When it comes to metrics that are being measured or captured very few are out there that people know about. An improvement would be to find a way to put more of that in people’s hands because what you measure, you improve on. It’s just natural.

And the Last Planner System® didn’t start out looking like it is today. They kept adding things to deal with the conditions or situations that they saw, and it resulted in this system that really does work if you follow it, but very few people follow it.

It might be useful just to say, “At the end of a well-run Last Planner® initiative within an organization or a team, here are the things that you should see on your projects. Here are characteristics that you should see for PPC and flow, etc. so they would continue to refine it. And throughout the process, awareness of the overall objective of improvement helps motivate people.

HM: Understanding the fit-for-purpose measurements is key to having a system that can, with the performance of the team, improve over time. We have to be putting those metrics in front of the people so that they can learn, improve and adjust their actions.

You have no chance of maintaining flow if you’re not doing end-of-day commitment management meetings. You must course correct every day with everybody. You can have all of the correct measurements—not that most people do—but you can have all the correct measurements and practices in place that will result in improved flow and shorter projects, but what about the people? How do we make this a set of a practices that enables people to become more competent builders?

MC: Yeah.

HM: One of the big opportunities that the Last Planner System® can pursue is that everyone is becoming better builders, and they’re becoming better planners. We put them in situations where the framer treats the plumber as his customer, and the plumber treats the electrician as his customer, and then the electrician treats the framer as his customer when the framer puts all the blocking in the wall.

This performer-customer relationship is fundamentally changing the social dynamics on the project. You can manifest it on a project, which we set out to do every single time on my Last Planner System® implementations. When you do that you learn so much more about what’s going on, and you learn directly from your customer. That feedback directly from your customer is an opportunity for each performing unit to grow.

Now, it’s not the only opportunity. Actually getting trades to practice Kaizen on their work for the sake of becoming better tradespeople and delivering better quality is very useful, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking today about, “How can the Last Planner System® be embraced as a Kaizen method?”

Let’s just talk about what’s critical if you want the Last Planner System® to function as a Kaizen method.

Number one, you have to have timely availability of data to drive decisions, and drive improvement, which drives learning. With Touchplan you have timely availability of the data and what was done today, and immediately you can find out how you’re doing. It’s more important on the bigger projects than the small projects because if you have manual reporting of what’s going on it could be a couple days before anybody could see across the project what’s happening. Even walking the floor doesn’t help you see what’s happening. You could be out there all day long and you’re not understanding how things are changing on you. It starts with measuring the right things and making sure you have measurements on anything that you want to improve, and that you have a way of making that data available in a timely way.

We’re also redefining the working relationships here. You don’t work for the superintendent, you work for each other. The next person in line is your customer, and perhaps two or three people later on in line are still your customers. Daily commitment management meetings at the end of the day or stand-ups that only last a few minutes are critical. You get to hear directly from the person you’re handing off that space to.

What else is necessary? One of the things that’s very helpful is to have people tell you what they’re interested in learning. It’s kind of a silly or obvious thing to say, but we don’t know. Foremen sometimes don’t know what their people need to learn because they have them doing the same thing every day. The better teams are talking to each other about what they’re trying to learn.

We have to be clear that we made an improvement, and that we’ve learned from the improvement, and without reflection that doesn’t happen. At any meeting that happens that takes thirty minutes or longer—it’s kind of the rule of thumb to do a plus delta—ask “What produced value? What should be changed to produce more value? What are individuals learning? What are you learning while you’re doing your work? What are you learning while you’re doing your planning? What are you doing while you’re doing promising?”

We’re not putting enough reflection on purpose and by design into our process. Building recurrent reflection for learning into our process is critical.

MC: I would add that there are obvious things that you would expect people to learn when they do their reflection. Being deliberate about showing them what you expect that they should learn, then helping them to do those things, and then getting them to do them on their own goes a long way in accelerating this self-improvement. Also, whatever it is that you’re trying to get people to learn, if there’s somebody there who’s learned it, the rest can learn from that person’s experience. And of course, if there is a mentor to bring you through a situation, or share their learning, it can really help accelerate this learning further.

HM: And that’s just one example of a facilitative skill that you want from that person and we don’t regularly get it from everyone. But we all have that capability to bring caring for those people that we’re working with. We might not have the habit of doing it, but we have the capability of doing it. We just need to introduce practices for it.

The Last Planner System® will be a Kaizen method when we make it so.

Katherine Van Adzin: So, I’ve heard people say that when you’re starting out with the Last Planner® System, you have to learn it on sticky notes. You disagree—why?

Hal Macomber: Here’s the interesting thing about everybody who says, “Oh, you gotta start with analog before you start digital.” My first question is always, “Well, have you experimented by starting with digital first?”

They say, “No, you’ve gotta start with analog first.”

I say, “So you don’t know, then?”

The truth is that most of the people who are saying that you must start with an analog approach haven’t examined doing it any other way. Nobody is saying this because they’ve got good experience or bad experience. At a minimum, they should be doing all kinds of experiments on what’s working or what’s not working.

And they’re not. Some of the people who are most vociferous about this are the ones that have been doing it longest, and it is absolutely antithetical to Lean, the not experimenting. We do experiments for learning. They’re not experimenting; they’re not learning. And they should be experimenting with it.

KV: Why do you think starting with software is preferable?

HM: The first thing that you need to be successful in both analog and digital settings is someone who knows how to use the Last Planner® System. Somebody needs to know what they should be doing. If you have customers who don’t know the Last Planner® System and they didn’t get any outside help, then they’re likely not going to do some of the basic things. But if you have somebody who is a competent user of the Last Planner® System, then they can easily figure out how to use Touchplan.

For example, how do you make promises for the coming week’s work? Your tutorial videos show how that’s done. A cursory view of Touchplan allows them to pull plan, do their pull plan, make their promises, status their promises, and get their PPC. That can be handled with the simplest of support, and as long as there’s one person on the job who knows what a good Last Planner® System implementation looks like, all of that support is already there from the software. Visually you can look at it, and it’s simple to do.

KV: What do you think are the biggest challenges to teams starting out?

HM: I notice that teams create work activities that are too long. It’s customary in the typical “three-week look-ahead world” that whatever the work is that needs to be done, it takes a week to do it, just because that’s how they’ve planned for years. If you look at their CPM schedules or the superintendent’s look-ahead plan, they’ll just say, “Yeah, do this work in this one week, do this work in that one week.” It’s not down to the day. It just shows the week and it shows five days. So people think in five-day planning periods and they use five-day planning periods.

KV: How does Touchplan counteract that?

HM: Touchplan counteracts it by presenting a card with the default conditions of a two-person crew working for one day. The last planner has to go in and think differently. How long is it really going to take you? What’s the smallest crew that you’re using, and the least amount of time it takes to do this? Two people for one day or two people for two days or three people for one day or four people for one day? Touchplan gets people to think about this the right way from the outset.

KV: What tends to trip people up if they don’t start off digitally?

HM: One of the challenges that people have with pull planning on the wall versus in software is that the logic isn’t obvious. By logic, what I mean is that if I’m going to place concrete, there are four or five precedent actions that need to occur. The excavation, sub material, forming, reinforcing and then an inspection that all are good, because once you put concrete in place, if it wasn’t right now you have to take it all out. You can’t correct something that wasn’t right, because it’s concrete.

When you put this on the wall with stickies, that looks like a very simple linear process. The inspection happens before the placement, the rebar happens before the inspection, the forming happens before the rebar, and the under material happens before the forming.

But we have a lot of situations where you need two or more precedent activities that happen either concurrently or separated in different value streams or by time gaps. So how do you show this? You take your marker and you draw a line on the background paper. And that means “we need this particular sticky that’s happening in week two before we do this thing that happens in week five.” And everything else that happens, all the other precedent work that’s needed, also happens in week five. So you do this completely out of sync thing. Well, how do you handle this on sticky notes and the wall? You don’t.

KV: And how does that differ if you’re using software?

HM: Touchplan makes it easy to handle these outside-the-workflow precedent activities. You’re able to do something that you need to do, and that you can’t do with sticky notes, very easily with Touchplan. And you only do it by exception, because the inference in the placement of the stickies—if you have some sticky note on the right—is that anything to its immediate left is a required precedent activity. The logic is inferred by the placement. And you can’t show that on the wall, but electronically, that’s handled very well.

KV: I’ve heard people say that more experienced teams can jump into a digital tool right away, but that novice teams need the experience of stickies on a wall. What are your thoughts?

HM: What’s true is that if you’re going to successfully use the Last Planner® System, you need to know what that means. What does success look like? So in all cases, you need somebody who can help. You must have somebody who knows what it looks like when it’s happening. So it’s always easier if the team has experience. But one person on the team who is recognized as being knowledgeable is sufficient. Just let that person lead.

KV: I think a lot of people who are wary of starting teams on digital think that by doing that it means that you either don’t have meetings anymore or you don’t communicate face-to-face. Do you run into that misconception?

HM: It all boils down to the question of what we’re trying to do with the Last Planner® System. Last planners are the foremen, they’re the people who are assigning work and who have the ability to make promises for the completion of that work. Now what we’re trying to do is build the plan based on the people who assign work and can make promises. So if we’re pull planning, we’re designing a plan that can be Lean. We’re tapping into their knowledge of both the work and the people.

And the only way you can pull plan is with those people in the room. Now you could sit there and import a plan from a CPM schedule, but the last planners had nothing to do with it. It’s the superintendent’s plan. If you try to build the project off of that, then you haven’t included the thinking of the last planners, their expertise and judgment. You haven’t included that in the development of the pull plan.

Even when the team is in the room together, if the conversation isn’t well-facilitated, then they’re just doing a puzzle. They’re not having a conversation about how to create flow on their project. What’s the production approach that will create flow on our project? That’s the question that you start with. We’re here to establish a production approach that produces flow on our project for this sequence of work, to get to this milestone. What’s crucial is that there’s someone there acting like a facilitative leader so that you tap into the expertise and judgment of the last planners.

Now, it’s true that Touchplan doesn’t force you to have that. It’s a canvas. The interesting thing though is it’s a smart canvas, so when you do things in certain ways, it makes inferences of what you meant, which can’t be done on a wall.

KV: Can you expand on the role of the facilitator?

HM: Sure. It’s a very important role. Ask yourself, is the superintendent changing his or her behavior to be a facilitative leader, or do they continue in the director mode? When I see director behavior I stop it because we need a facilitator, not a director. It’s about changing the conversation between the people, and you need a facilitative leader to do that.

You also need to be clear on what you’re there to do. You’re designing a production approach for a phase of the work so that you can achieve flow. That’s what you’re there to do. And there are engineering principles that need to be followed, as well as the nature of the construction activities that need to be understood. It takes both of those. Most teams make a dramatic improvement in the pull plans done by the trades versus the production plans that are done by superintendents because they get a superior understanding of the nature of the construction work while the planning is going on. But they can be far superior once we introduce the engineering principles associated with good production system design.

KV: Aside from the facilitation, what other benefits do you see from digital planning?

HM: There are some very practical aspects of why your first weekly work plan needs to be digital. All the calculations are done for you. All statuses can be distributed. You don’t have to be chasing people around. They have tablets, they can tell you that they finished or they didn’t finish. Right off the bat, you have a far better chance that you’re going to get a good report on PPC. I don’t mean that it’s going to be high PPC, I mean it’s going to be an accurate reporting of what happened, and that you’re in a position to share that promptly and to improve on that.

So you’re in much better shape using software than spreadsheets, because spreadsheets are filled out by hand, they need to be collated, they need to be somehow updated and use some kind of math, either spreadsheets online so the math is done automatically for you, or you’re doing this offline.

The second thing that’s much easier right away is making improvements. Last planners’ first promises won’t be very accurate. At the outset, the last planners don’t understand enough about their work to get it right. Using Touchplan, you have a robust way of managing all of the re-planning that needs to happen. So, over the course of two to four weeks, the last planners learn as they move their work items around electronically, which can’t be done with sticky notes and spreadsheets.

Third, there are a lot of people who don’t want to record PPC from the beginning. They want to see if they’ll get used to this Last Planner® thing first. But if they use the software, they can be better in week two than they were in week one, because they can see what they learned. Like, oh, look at this. All these plumbing, welding tasks took longer. Why did they take longer? We don’t know yet, but we know for next week to add an extra day across these tasks. Boom! Already the next week’s plan is better, even if they don’t understand why.

If you don’t have the data, you can’t improve right away. Touchplan immediately gives you the data. So from the beginning, you can make data-informed improvements from week two.

The team sees a visual indicator of what needs improvement. They don’t have to study the data. That’s so important. For example, look at all these red pins for plumbing. Let’s dive in and look at it. Oh my gosh, it’s all welding tasks. What are we going to do about it next week? Add another day across the board. Perfect. Improvement made.

KV: What are the differences you see in the way constraints are handled?

HM: In the analog world, constraints are handled independently of the sticky notes on a constraints log document. With Touchplan, you print a constraints log from a visual display of the constraints on the plan. And the constraints are linked to the activity that’s being constrained. So if I need a hot work permit to weld three days before I do the welding, that shows up on the plan, and if it’s not available three days before, then that welding activity all of a sudden turns a different color. So we see immediately that work that we should be doing is at risk of not happening. The whole team, not just the construction manager, is now in the position of seeing what needs attention, why, and what’s at risk. And that is absolutely not possible with stickies. Everybody using analog approaches is maintaining a constraints removal process completely separate from their plan.

KV: What else is different?

HM: Another key to making the Last Planner® System work is to shift the relationships of last planners to each other. We get high PPC and good flow when we have trade partner foremen treating each other as partners, as customers. How does software help this happen? The principal way is in the always-available visual display of the customer-performer relationships in the promise period. Nobody is able to do that when they’re analog. But if you start with digital, you get there in week one.

Another is latency of data, which I sometimes call friction. The latency in the analog approach makes the data less useful. Even when we get it, we’ve already gone on to different work.

So eliminating that latency makes the data much more valuable. It’s much more like driving with a dashboard. What you’re looking at on the dashboard is useful while you’re driving, as opposed to calculating the miles per gallon of the last 100 miles you’ve driven. The usefulness of data is dramatically diminished by the latency, and you don’t even get the data if you didn’t put in the administrative effort.

But with Touchplan, all that latency goes away. And you get the benefits from that on day one.

Going to LCI Congress 2018? Let’s meet.