I don't see many stories in the news about lean construction. Earlier this week Contractor Magazine led with the story Lean Thinking Works in Construction Too. The article does a good job describing lean thinking and making the case for adopting lean in construction.
The impediments to lean thinking are many, Dennis Sowards said: no sense of urgency, lack of leadership, poor communication with employees, no short-term wins or celebrations for reinforcement, and seeing lean thinking as a quick fix and not as standard operating procedure.
Dennis says, "The biggest impediment is a mind-set that it does not work in construction." But don't tell that to TDIndustries, Boldt Construction, Messer Contstruction, and many others. They are driving waste out of their projects while delivering increased value to their customers.
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Work Injury Free
Trenches must meet at least one of the following conditions:
Read Safety Everyday's construction safety in the news sideblog.
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When talking about lean this and lean that, so much attention is given to the tools -- 7 wastes, kanban, kaizen, kaikaku, SMED, etc. -- rather than the tool users. John Seddon cautions us to Watch Out for the Toolheads. John makes his living helping service companies adopt lean practices. While the general idea of lean travels easily among many industries, the methods of lean production don't. John provides an approach that can make your service company lean. He calls it The Vanguard Method.
The purpose of lean is to increase capacity by designing a system that optimally responds to customer demand.
John does a wonderful job describing what it means to be lean and how production and services are different. He does not go into projects. However, you won't find a better primer on lean than John's article Watch Out for the Toolheads. This article is a keeper. He goes to great extent to describe what is lean and what is not lean.
I haven't read a more concise and informative document to introduce you to the basics of the lean approach. You'll learn about fail-safing, just-in-time, 5S (visual management), and the history of lean. Don't hesitate. Get your own copy now.
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Effern, one of my readers, has been writing a weblog titled The Vision Thing on the topics of business, process, and management. Effern interviewed three project management bloggers, Johanna Rothman: Managing Product Development, Clarke Ching: I Think Not, Baby Puppy, and me for a podcast series he calls The Sound of Vision.
With all my travel last week I was just able to connect to listen to the podcast. Effern interviewed us separately then patched together a program. I am quite surprised how well it came out. Each of us spoke for about 20 mins on our perspective of project management. You'll find three complementary approaches. Have a listen -- put a voice to the online ramblings -- then get over to each of the weblogs.
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A heavy travel schedule this week provided the opportunity to catch up on loads of reading. Baseline Magazine is a monthly that focuses on IT projects and issues. Executive editor John McCormick wrote Projects Don't Fail, People Do. He says we only need to look to Occam's razor for the answer. Huh? That's what I said. McCormick explains it this way:
"The rule known in scientific and philosophical circles as Occam's razor stipulates that when multiple theories are available to explain a problem, the simplest one is preferred."
Projects don't fail; the people who manage project managers fail.
He uses Occam's razor to answer the question, "Why do projects fail?" He refers to a series of government studies of project failures to conclude that everywhere there is a failure people are at the cause of the failure. He cites:
The general thinking is project management training and certification will go a long way to correcting this. Maybe. I fully agree that people fail not projects. I've stopped looking at the project manager. Why is it we put people in roles for which they are unqualified? Why are we not training our staff? And, what are we doing that we don't notice when project managers are not managing? The simple answer is those who manage and lead project managers are not doing their job.
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Fredrik Wacka writing in Webpro News Using Blogs for Project Management says the time is here for project weblogs.
"Project blogs integrated into an intranet will, I believe, prove to be one of the most valuable types of corporate blogging."
Fredrik is a regular writer on blogging. Not only is he suggesting that project champions blog he advocates Why Corporate Boards Should Blog. I've been writing a weblog now for 2½ years. I also work with project teams across the AEC industry. Maybe other projects are ready for this. The AEC environment is not ready. For the most part, project participants have neither the time or the inclination for reading or writing this sort of thing. Sure project teams would benefit tremendously from more story-telling about the project. But for now, I can't see recommending it to anyone and I wrote a specification for a project weblog.
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Are you interested in spectatcular team results?
"Would a 36 percent reduction in unit cost interest your management? How about a 40 percent improvement in productivity, or a reduction of cycle time from 55 days to 1 day, resulting in a savings of $1 million? These are all actual figures from the 2004 final round of competition at the International Team Excellence Awards event.
Cathy Webber says all that is possible in her article for last week's edition of Projects @ Work*, Making Collaboration Work. Ms. Webber says the difficulty with collaboration is a function of poor leadership.
"Leaders do a poor job of creating an open, inclusive, inspiring, supportive, and motivating environment where collaborative project teams can flourish."
What can we do to help them, help us?
Ms. Webber says the results are available when leaders do the following:
Take some time to read Cathy Webber's article. Then, share it with your team. You might need their help.
* Disclosure: I accepted an invitation to join the editorial board of Projects @ Work.
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Lean (production) is the new Atkins Diet for manufacturers.
You've got to subscribe to Industry Week Perspectives if only to read John R. Brandt, former editor of Industry Week. In Brandt's latest Brandt on Leadership column, Hooked On Lean? he offers a cynical and humorous view of a trend for everything to go lean.
There's lean marketing, lean healthcare, lean leadership, (add your favorite here). Brandt notes,
"The cultural perception of lean mutated from an actual improvement process into a fashion accessory for senior executives."He argues that we can't expect senior managers to embrace lean as strategy. Rather, Brandt pins the problem on a more insidious issue:
"What (executives) really love (but can't admit) is being able to act like they're on top of the latest management trends -- think MBWA, think TQM, think Reengineering -- without having to do anything new or different."So, for those few people who are still under the illusion that making the case for lean is within your reach, don't bother. It's bound to go out of fashion...just like the Atkins Diet.
Read more Brandt on Leadership.
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Software plans often lack common sense (and a) user focus
eWeek reports the FBI is likely to scrap their $170 million Virtual Case File software project. It's not the first big software project to fail, nor will it be the last. What I find interesting is the explantation offered by Eric Lundquist, editor-in-chief of eWeek, in the January 31, 2005 issue. Lundquist speculates (he says he doesn't have first-hand details) it is the compound effects of "too much turnover at the top management levels, too many promises of what the software would be capable of doing, and too little contact with the people who would use the software of a day-to-day basis. He sums it up as, "Software plans often lack common sense (and a) user focus.
We need a new common sense for developing and delivering projects of all types. I'll echo Lundquists speculations and I'll add a few of my own. Projects run well when the planning and execution are tightly coupled in a way that adapts to what the team is learning, innovating, and encountering. Call it agile or call it lean; either way, put the people performing on the project at the center of your concern when managing it.
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Work Injury Free
"It's particularly disturbing to see many of the same hazards at three different jobsites overseen by the same general contractor. Left uncorrected, these conditions expose employees to potential serious injury or death from falls, electrocution, scaffold collapse, gas cylinder explosions or head injuries."
Scaffolding and fall protection are two of the leading issues in the industry. There is no excuse for anyone putting themselves or others at risk on projects. Let's make sure we all go home to our families every night.
Read Safety Everyday's construction safety in the news sideblog.
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I'm sticking with the status quo. Although, I have joined the PMI and I will take the PMP exam. There's real value in becoming more professional even if we don't become a profession.
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The various project worlds can learn from each other. While designing and constructing buildings is different from designing and coding software, planning and managing the projects is often more alike than not. In Johanna Rothman's post Invest in the Design of Your Project Every Day, she encourages us to be ready to change the plan each day.
We've all see the phenomenon that as soon as you've scheduled the project, the schedule is out of date. If you plan to invest in replanning and rescheduling, that doesn't matter.
Note: Johanna is not saying change your goals or your overall promise to the customer. She's also not encouraging that we make changes in a vacuum. The key is to be responsible...to your customer, to other members of the team, and to yourself.
One-time planning can't anticipate ALL of what we must deal with to succeed with our projects. Neither will solo-planning. So, do as Johanna suggests, build-in regular cycles for replanning, and do it collaboratively.
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Join David Schmaltz and Amy Schwab at their residential leadership development program for project leaders. These two people will push you, nurture you, and keep you just at the edge of discomfort...just the place you need to be for a great learning experience. Check it out!
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By now you might be agreeing with Patrick Lencioni's book title, Death by Meeting! Hold on...the protocols all work together.
We have a process for making ready the requested work so it can be promised. We have a process for making promises day-by-day for performing the work. Now we need a process for finding out what work is in process and what is being completed. We can't wait 'til a weekly meeting. Why? Because your work tomorrow depends on my completion today. Coming into work tomorrow only to find out that my group hasn't finished now creates a mess for you and your workgroup. If you could have found out two days earlier you would have adjusted your workplan.
The daily coordination meeting is a very short meeting. You'll want to conduct the meeting standing up. And if you have to conduct the meeting on the phone, then get everyone to promise to be standing when they are on the call! No kidding. Getting comfortable will only extend the meeting. Also, no coffee, doughnuts, birthday cakes, etc. This is a meeting to fine tune the work we are doing with each other. It doesn't take more than 15 minutes.
The meeting starts by asking people to report complete on the work promised for the day. "I'm done" or "I'm not done" are the only allowed responses. Only complete work releases work for other people. When someone reports "Not done" ask for a new promise. You'll also want to ask what kept the performer from completing as promised. Record the reason provided for future analysis and removal of the cause of the planning (promising) failure. Record the number of promises completed as a percent of promises made for that day. Graph the results and display the graph where you conduct your daily meeting. Record the reasons for plan failure in Pareto chart fashion (vertical bar chart by reason type).
Next you'll want to ask people if they need any help to complete their promised work. Often constraints will arise in the course of doing the work in spite of the effort given to look-ahead planning. This is also a time for people to announce that they will be doing work identified as workable backlog.
What's the best time to have a daily coordination meeting? It depends: either at the beginning or end of the workday. On construction sites the end of the day works well. It gives people the opportunity to do some replanning overnight and to authorize some overtime to complete work before the start of the next day. In other settings -- new products development, software, engineering, architecture -- the beginning of the days seems to work well. People are often keeping different work hours. The beginning of the day schedule allows them to fine tune their actions for the day.
Are we complete? Not yet. Last up, improving the system performance.
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