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Getting started with the Last Planner® System (LPS) is easier than you think! Using Touchplan, a digital LPS tool, improves your project team’s communication and allows you to work more efficiently, saving you time and money. And with that time saved, you can take on more work and grow your business.

Touchplan is easy to learn and even easier to use—most of our users are up and running in just minutes with schedules that are accessible anytime, anywhere. Unlock continuous improvement for your team by viewing a demo of Touchplan today.

Katherine Van Adzin: How did you get started as a Lean consultant?

Hal Macomber: I’ve been involved with Lean since around 1984. I’ve been involved with the Last Planner® System since 1997. I’ve been using Last Planner® System as long as just about anybody has, over 20 years. Lean Project Consulting was a company that I joined with Greg Howell in 2002, and Greg Howell is a co-developer of the Lean Construction Institute. Lean Project Consulting was the premier consulting company. It was the largest one once and is the largest one now.

In the early days, projects were planned using spreadsheet-based printed forms. A few years later, we added sticky notes and butcher paper for doing pull planning on the wall. We never used the electronic forms for those projects, a lot of the projects didn’t have computers on the jobsite. They would print forms and use them, and that’s what we did.

KV: What was your introduction to Touchplan?

HM: I was involved with the Last Planner® System long before I was involved with Touchplan. It was through MOCA’s project management services. In particular, with a project for Massachusetts DCAMM, Department of Capital Assets Management and Maintenance. MOCA surprised me in the summer of 2014. They said hey, we’ve got an electronic sticky note planning product in the works. We want you to see it.

At the time, there were many serious Last Planner® System users, because Last Planner® System in 2014 was twenty-four years old. It had been around a long time, but it existed under the radar for most companies.

KV: When did you begin using Touchplan on all your projects?

HM: For a long time, the thinking was that the Last Planner® System should be analog—stickies on the wall—on purpose. But I thought two things. Number one, we should always be doing experiments. My clients experimented with Touchplan, vPlanner, SPS, and with what eventually became Autodesk Planner. Number two, stickies on a wall doesn’t scale. Projects were getting bigger. Teams were working remotely. And, they needed help from my associates and me without getting on a plane.

I’ve been using software—other than spreadsheets and forms and sticky notes—going all the way back to 1999. I had experience over all those years using very expensive software. When you look at what this other software does, it takes a lot of effort. The administrative effort to use it is much higher and requires more senior people to use it than Touchplan does.

I was on a project in 2015, and I said to the GC, “This is going to be impossible to manage on the Last Planner® System.” I could see ahead of time there was going to be no way to manage the project without putting in two assistant project managers who would just be full-time maintaining the Last Planner® System.

So, I persuaded them that we should try Touchplan. I was confident at the time that the software was ready. And it was so much better than other software that was available. We put in an assistant superintendent as the key person managing the Last Planner® System using Touchplan.

In about two weeks, we had really amazing reliability for the completion of work, PPC, and we had very high participation among all of the trades. Nobody was letting us down. It was easy for them to interact.

It was easy to use. It gave us the data. We always knew where we were. People were all latched on. They already had to use iPads. They had to use them because that’s how they were managing their daily safety test plans, and that’s how they were getting their construction documents. It came together naturally on that project. In fact, this contractor’s experience there was so positive that they became a customer at an enterprise level.

KV: And the rest is history?

HM: Yes. After I left Lean Project Consulting in 2016, I took on clients, and I said, hey, if you’re going to work with me, you need new software. There were three or four platforms available. It’s okay with me whichever one you want to pick, but my recommendation is Touchplan. Only one company went with an alternative, and they decided not to do it again.

One of the biggest benefits to me is I can look at everybody’s plan and see what they’re updating and not updating, see when they’re messing up the way they’re planning. I can get on the phone—I don’t have to visit them to coach them. Previously, what I had to do is get scans and send spreadsheets and photographs of their whole plans on the wall. They get you online and set up cameras. It’s focused on the wall or their sticky note planning. You can’t read anything, and it was a disaster. A complete disaster.

KV: What were the initial reactions you got when you began mandating the use of software?

HM: They said, “We don’t want to use software. We think we should be using sticky notes on the wall.” I said, “Then we’re not working together.” I have not regretted turning down work with companies that won’t work with software. I haven’t regretted it once, making that requirement.

And sometimes it’s a process. There’s a company that I’ve declined to work with three times. The first two times were because they wouldn’t use software. They finally came around, and the third time was I insisted on meeting with the CEO of the company. I said if you don’t have the C-suite involved with adopting Lean, then we’re not going to succeed. So they figured out how I could meet with him, and now we work together and it’s very successful.

KV: Do you sense that the industry’s approach to software adoption is changing?

HM: I find that a number of things have changed. Today Touchplan has 600-plus projects and 10,000 users. You have a lot of users on these projects, and you’ve got a lot of fans, particularly trade partner foremen. And I see companies losing projects to other companies that use software.

When you begin to look at all this, there’s overwhelming evidence that this is working for them, helping them. This is adding value to them, and that makes it much easier to stick with Last Planner®.

Let me speak about some of the direct value that I’m witnessing. Inside of a company, if you want to understand how the Last Planner® System works, you’d have to go hang out on the project site over a number of days to watch and see how planning is happening and learn what are these things called make-ready planning and constraints. You go through all this, and there’s no easy way to learn what’s going on.

On the other hand, with Touchplan, I can be sitting in Austin, Texas, and you can be sitting in San Antonio. I can say, “Hey, tell me about your project.” You say, “Let me share my screen.” You take me through the programming, tell me about people working. You show me this plumber who’s always on time and this electrician who you’re struggling with. There was no way to do that before software.

People haven’t been able to see that gain. We’ve been trivializing Last Planner® System projects that have turned out well. It gets diminished by people who don’t understand what’s going on. Today, we can see that yeah, we have to have a good team, but a good team with the wrong tools is going to deliver a bad project.

Now, you can deal with data. You can quickly pull off reports. You press the button and you have reports for the last six weeks. It’s an easy thing for me to say, “Katie, you and this plumbing foreman have been running down the electricians for three weeks in a row.” You can point to the data. That’s a vastly different situation than saying “No, I feel like you should be bringing more people in here, Katie. You don’t seem to be doing it.” There’s no seems. We can have a conversation about data. It’s persuasive. And you can pinpoint exactly why your project metrics aren’t improving and rectify that.

KV: Do you see this as the direction in which the whole industry is headed?

HM: I think that the Last Planner® System is the direction that we’re all headed in. The best evidence of that is the attendance at the LCI annual conference. Attendance has increased by about thirty percent a year over the last seven years.

I think we’re now in an unstoppable moment. What’s happening is the foremen now have so much more information about the total project than they ever had before. They know what each other’s work is. They’ve got the plans for each other, not just plans for themselves. They’re involved in the design documents. They’re involved in the production planning of a job. They make promises.

I call this “power to the edge.” At the face of the work, we’re putting power in the hands of trade partner foremen they’ve never had before, and they love it. There’s no going back. Control of the project is moving to the front line and is not at the top of the hierarchy. Not with the project executive or the construction manager. That trend is not going to change.

 

The term “takt time” comes from the German word “Takt,” which refers to a bar of music or meter. In the context of Lean, the term is used to refer to the pace of production required to match customer demand. Takt time is equal to a product’s sell rate. For example, if a car manufacturer sells one car every five minutes, the company needs to produce one finished car every five minutes in order to maintain takt time.

Continue reading “Lean Training: How to Track and Measure Takt Time in Touchplan”

We’re frequently asked, “What’s the best way to manage multiple shifts in Touchplan?” The simple solution is to use a combination of locations and swim lanes. The locations will allow you to sort reports and the day and night shift work will be separated to show manpower reporting for both shifts (see Figure 4). Swim lanes make it much easier to view both shifts in the plan.

The plan below (Figure 1) is a typical work sequence to rough in two floors of a small building. The team put together this sequence in a pull planning session with all trade foremen creating their work activities.

Figure 1

After creating the pull plan, the team activated the plan and created their three-week look-ahead (Figure 2) for floors one and two.

Figure 2

Here’s how the same plan would look running two shifts (day and night). The team agreed that all trades would staff so that they would have a day and night shift. The team took the existing single shift plan and broke the work up into two shifts (Figure 3).

Figure 3

The first major takeaway is that they cut the overall duration in half. Any multi-day activities were spread across both shifts. For example, a two-day task could now be completed in one day using day and night shifts. The task “hang pipe on floor 1” (Figure 2) takes two days in the day-shift-only plan and is scheduled to start on August 8. In the two-shift plan, the same activity begins the morning of August 8 and finishes on the night shift that same day.

Figure 4

Figure 5

The day and night shifts both have nine workers on Wednesday and Thursday, August 8 and 9. The HVAC contractor is the only subcontractor not working nights. This same day/night shift strategy can be used for three or more shifts, or hourly work when your standard work batches are broken down to that level of detail.

The pull planning process will help the team better understand how to best design the flow of work based on their shared understanding of available skilled workers, material supply chains, equipment logistics, and all the other factors related to the work. This is accomplished by framing the planning discussion in terms of satisfying team member needs instead of executing work because it is available. This need-based approach forces a level of negotiation, small-batch design and work balancing. Once the team has a work sequence they agree on, the team can then discuss and plan for multi-shift work to accelerate delivery of the milestone.

For more Lean learning, register for Touchplan’s webinar at the Lean Construction Institute Congress 2018 here.

Tom Richert, a Principal with Lean Project Consulting, dropped by Touchplan last week for a conversation about his new book, Lean Conversations: The Energy of the Creative Ethos in Your Life and Work. The book presents the findings of a workshop Richert designed to introduce a group of professionals from a variety of artistic fields to Lean methodology, and to learn more about their perspective. Our conversation has been condensed and slightly edited.

Continue reading “Lean Conversations: Q&A with Tom Richert”

Critical path method (CPM) scheduling has been part of the construction industry for decades, and is a widely used form of schedule management. A CPM schedule is created by compiling a list of the activities and milestones necessary to complete a project, determining the durations of individual activities, and tying these together in a network of dependencies to establish schedule dates, a critical path and an overall project duration.

For many years, CPM has offered the most logical way to generate a high-level view of a project’s key milestones and sequence. But for more granular scheduling, such as a weekly work plan, Lean methods like the Last Planner® System (LPS) are better suited. Below we’ll explain how to combine CPM and LPS to maximize the effectiveness of your scheduling process.

The Pros and Cons of CPM Scheduling

CPM is an effective way to map out the key activities and major milestones of a project, as well as to determine the expected duration of each activity and the estimated duration of the project as a whole. CPM schedules offer a useful visual representation of the dependencies between activities and can highlight logic errors in the plan.

But as with any task in construction, success depends on having the right tool for the job. CPM scheduling is most effective when kept to a level 1 or level 2 work breakdown structure (WBS). When broken down further, to a level 3 or 4 WBS, the schedule becomes too detailed to be a practical planning tool. The additional level of detail doesn’t correspond to greater adherence to the plan or faster project completion, and can instead create a false sense of certainty in the schedule.

Another factor to note is that CPM schedules overemphasize the activities designated as critical, with non-critical activities able to become critical if their schedule slips, sometimes even by just one day. CPM scheduling is also prone to user error and can be manipulated to generate a desired result, which opens the door to other issues. Additionally, CPM schedules generally are not the product of team planning and are often generated with only minimal input from those doing the planned work.

These pitfalls combine to make it very difficult to actually adhere to a CPM schedule. Repeated experiences with CPM schedules that weren’t followed can make participants skeptical of the planning process itself, which creates problems with buy-in and accountability down the road.

Enter LPS

These are the issues that LPS is designed to address. Instead of getting bogged down creating thousands of activities in a CPM schedule, it’s more workable to use CPM as an outline of the project, and to use LPS as your tool for more collaborative, detailed planning. This can be done very efficiently with a digital LPS tool like Touchplan that integrates with CPM schedules.

Teams can build on the logic and dependencies from the CPM schedule to plan at a more granular “task” level through look-ahead planning and weekly work planning. The closer the team gets to doing the work, the more detailed the plan should become, and teams should commit to specific task completion dates at this level. Touchplan can be used to track how everyone is doing against their commitments. If deadlines are missed, figure out why and update the remainder of the plan accordingly. This way, the team gets the benefits of CPM without the downsides.

A key advantage of using Touchplan in addition to CPM is that unlike CPM, Touchplan can be easily updated by the team in real time. As soon as something changes on the job, the project schedule can incorporate that change and adjust the rest of the plan to reflect it. Because the plan is updated continually by the team, everyone is more invested in it and intent on putting their best effort forward to make their commitments and achieve the plan.

Touchplan also serves as a system of record; the schedule is stored permanently and all delays and changes need to be justified, making it easy to identify the causes and preempt disputes. Trying to figure out where a project went wrong using a CPM schedule requires painstaking comparisons of multiple versions of the schedule to find changes that were made, typically without any documented explanation.

A Better Path

A good way to understand how these two scheduling methods work together is to think of a bookcase. The CPM schedule is the bookcase, and the bookends are project milestones that divide it into phases. All of the detailed information resides within the books on the shelf, much like the weekly work plans that are created using LPS. The pages of each book make up the tasks within each weekly work plan.

Introducing new technology doesn’t mean introducing complexity. Watch a demo to learn how Touchplan enables you to simplify your project scheduling, collaborate productively and work more efficiently.

 

The Last Planner® System is a uniquely effective way to plan your project and organize your team, but the pull planning process itself can be time-consuming and inefficient. Typically, participants have to wait while one person at a time places their sticky notes on the wall. “You’re getting up, you’re getting down. Up and down constantly, that’s taking a lot of time when you’re trying to schedule things,” says David Stenzel, a project manager at Cianbro.

Touchplan gives you time back by enabling the team to work collaboratively on a real-time, digital version of the plan that keeps everyone connected and up to date. Because everyone can see the plan, teams can keep each other accountable and work around any constraints that arise.