The traditional way to try speeding up projects does not work. Adding short-notice excess labor, bringing materials to the site outside of JIT and too soon to the zone, increasing work in progress above the capacity of resources, throwing money at the problem [as suggested by CPM crashing strategies] and rushing, pushing, and panicking people will only extend your project duration, not shorten it. Not only are those methods not Lean because they disrespect people, they are also ineffective. So it might be helpful to discuss how a project can be sped up. There are many healthy ways, but I want to mention five in this blog post.
But before I begin, I want to say that whatever we do, we must follow these Rules of Flow in Production Planning when recovering, expediting, or shortening phase durations:
As long as we are following those rules, we will never hurt people with our planning or get ourselves into trouble. And the following five options comply with those rules.
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Improve Your Bottlenecks
To start, let’s begin with Bottlenecks. Every project phase will have a “slowest crew” or trade and a “most difficult zone.” These are not derogatory terms, they simply describe the law of bottlenecks in construction, which is that every system will have a limiting factor or bottleneck, and when that bottleneck is optimized another one will appear. When using the magic of a time by location format for production planning we can easily see our trade and zone bottlenecks. When we find the trade bottleneck we can split the crew, improve the work, pre-hire an additional resource, or package it differently. When we find a zone bottleneck, we can adjust the zone boundary or improve the work within the zone. The bottom line is that your phase is only going as fast as your bottlenecks. If you want to speed up, then find and optimize your bottlenecks.
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Adjust Your Number of Zones
The second strategy is to look at Zoning your project differently. As you can see in the quick and small example below, you can speed up a construction phase simply by adjusting how many zones you have in an area.
In the picture below the first option has 2 zones and the second has 6 for the same area. And you will see an overall gain in the phase of 4 days. When this kind of thinking is applied to real construction projects you can save weeks and months. When I was first taught to schedule I was told to just stick with 10,000 SF for zones because it matched well with concrete placements. I have since found out that this guess thinking is wrong. Your zones could be anywhere between 2,000 and 12,000 SF. The key is to use the Takt Calculator found on www.leantakt.com and simulate your options.
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Design to the Work Package
The third option is to Design to the Work Package. I first read of this in the book, Built to Fail by Todd R. Zabelle. The idea here is to ‘design to’ the work package to make it go better. We should not crash it after the design is done by pushing and throwing money at the problem. If we know the work package takes too long to support our project or phase duration, we should work with the trades and ask if there is anything the team can design differently, fabricate differently, delivery differently, or install differently to make the work package duration take less time WITHOUT overburdening or hurting people. This is done before and during design development, but it is never too late to begin this kind of thinking. If you want to shorten the duration for a work package, think about designing that adjustment into the work itself.
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Use the Last Planner® System with Takt
The fourth one is basically implementing the Last Planner System (LPS) with Takt. A major tactic when wanting to speed up or at least go as fast as possible is to implement LPS. The Lean Builder is a great book for this paired with the books Takt Planning and Takt Steering & Control. If you involve your Last Planners by pull planning every phase 3 months ahead; hosting a pre-con meeting [pre-install or preparatory] 3 weeks before the work package begins; aligning materials to your look-ahead with buffers; finding and removing roadblocks on that look-ahead before they impact you; and executing a collaborative weekly work plan in the field to create flow, you will stay ahead of your issues and really implement a Lean flow system.
Once in place, keep improving the system with your Plan, Do, Check, Adjust method, and remember, flow does not come from pushing, it comes from making work ready out ahead.
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Align Your Work In Progress
The fifth and final option in this blog is to align WIP. Work in progress at high levels, and especially past the capacity of the system, resources, and people, will only extend your project duration. Consider a freeway as an analogy. Do you get where you are going faster or slower if there are more cars on it? Do you get where you are going faster or slower if there is a roadblock and more cars added ahead of it? The answer is simple. Adding too many cars to a freeway and pushing more into a roadblock will only make things take longer.
That is true for construction as well. The more work you push beyond the capacity of the team, system, people, and resources, the longer things will take. And the same holds true when construction has a problem. We should not add more resources and people, we should rather focus on fixing the problem.
You are going to have to trust me on this. There is never a time to push. What we need is flow. So, start work on a rhythm, level the work per that rhythm, and finish on a rhythm. The worst thing you can do is add too many work fronts, have too much WIP, and multitask.
These five ideas are only the beginning. As we implement Lean construction methods, we are finding many more that work to expedite your project without ever hurting people. And that is the Lean part of this blog.
The most important Lean concept to me is respect for people. We can become efficient the right way only if people come first.
Related Posts
Takt Time – Phase Planning & Pull Planning in a Takt-Ed System
A Prediction – Takt, Last Planner, & Scrum Will Take Over Our Industry
Jason Schroeder, Elevate Construction
Jason Schroeder is a former Field Operations and Project Director. He has worked as a construction leader for 23 years through positions that range from field engineer to project superintendent, general superintendent, and field operations director. He is the Owner and Lead Trainer at Elevate Construction, a company focused on elevating construction throughout the world by providing insights, solutions, and training. His mission is to create respect in the field, through trained leaders, which ultimately preserves and protects families in construction. He is the creator of the Field Engineer Boot Camp and Superintendent Boot Camp, which are immersive courses that train field leadership. Jason Schroeder hosts the Elevate Construction Podcast, a blog through elevateconstructionist.com, and trains, consults, and coaches throughout the world.
