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Revisiting the Five Big Ideas Transforming the Design and Construction Industry: What Comes After the Five Big Ideas? (Part 10)

(Hal Macomber, EVP, Touchplan with George Hunt, Head of Presales / Sales Engineering, Touchplan ) Greg Howell and I proposed the Five Big Ideas Transforming the Design and Construction Industry at a time  (2004) when extraordinary requirements for seismic upgrades were required in California. There was general agreement that then-current practices wouldn’t suffice. The #FiveBigIdeas led four years later to Lean Integrated Project Delivery (LIPD). Many CA healthcare projects have been completed under this model along with countless projects across the country including theme parks, higher Ed, and life sciences projects. 

Today the industry is faced with equally daunting challenges, including

  • Unaffordable housing and infrastructure
  • Decarbonization of the built environment and the industry that puts it in place
  • A vanishing workforce, not just that the industry is unattractive, but we’re not replacing the population (birthrate is < 2) 
  • Underperforming on equity, diversity, and inclusion
  • Cultures to sustain changes
  • A built environment that is resilient to rising sea levels and storms

 To that let’s acknowledge that significant change is underway, including

  • Off-site/Industrialized Construction
  • Digitalization/datafication of everything
  • Power to the edge — we’re enabling the workforce using their phones — and force multiplier — the tools allow the trades to have more capability at their fingertips
  • Consolidation of the industry
  • Influx of technologies aimed at doing more with less people (i.e. 3D printing, drones, robotics)

Our current engineering-like approaches to challenges and change are insufficient for guiding and designing the future in the face of these challenges and change. We need another approach. That approach is systems thinking.

Systems thinking was birthed at the Sloan School of Management, MIT in the early ‘50s by Jay Forrester. He wasn’t alone speaking about the systems nature of manufacturing, the economy, ecology, management of organizations, and other complex phenomena. At about the same time, W. Edwards Deming was speaking about thinking in systems. So too was Russel Ackoff who was teaching Operations Research at Wharton. But it was Peter Senge who made systems thinking popular with The Fifth Discipline, The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (1990). (See Tools of a System Thinker) 14 years later, Jeffrey Liker writing in The Toyota Way made a fleeting reference to the importance of systems thinking. 17 years later Liker acknowledged he missed the significance of systems thinking in Toyota’s success. He restated Principle 1 as “Base your management decisions on long-term systems thinking, even at the expense of short-term financial goals.”

While systems thinking is multi-faceted, one defining characteristic is that socio-technical systems, those that involve people and technology, have circular causality rather than simple linear causality. In other words, we typically think linearly that A causes B and B causes C. But how about A causes B and B causes A — circular causality? Examples include the rich get richer; the smart get smarter; the complicated gets more complicated. Deming and others describe the challenges of profound change, like moving from command and control to participative management, or from mass construction to Lean construction, as governed by the systems nature of both the current condition and the future condition. When I’ve worked with organizations that are adopting Lean practices, it’s at least as important to decide what you will stop doing as what you will start doing. Otherwise, the current system will prevail. 

George reminds us that many people looked at using Touchplan as additional work on top of what they were already doing. In systems terminology that is the balancing loop “not enough time.” We changed the way that we introduced teams to using it. We looked at our current look-ahead and planning process and made changes so that Touchplan would fit into what they already were doing, not adding additional work on top of them.

We can be optimistic about Putting the Five Big to Work if we approach it from a systems perspective. Otherwise, we are merely layering new practices on top of existing practices. This inevitably leads to a breakdown of the current system. Organizations won’t let that happen, therefore they abandon the change. Embracing circular causality is the path for making profound change. Thinking in systems takes the focus off of the people and puts it instead on the system. It respects the fact that “humans are humans”, which follows along with the “respect for people” principle and the outward mindset.

Where do you start? We suggest starting by viewing design and construction as project-based production systems that are governed by clear theory and practice. Starting in two weeks, George Hunt and I will explore how project production management has reshaped how we approach the design of construction projects. By design, we mean the principles from which we create our production plans and we improve on them. We will engage collaborators as we have in this series to bring you the best thinking we know that is available. 

Thanks for following us.

For an example of approaching projects from a systems perspective take a look at Touchplan’s Custom Fields feature which helps projects have a centralized focus and a more efficient workflow. 

If you would like to revisit any of the posts from the Revisiting the Five Big Ideas series you can find all of them below.

Helpful Tips to Manage Stress and Improve Quality of Life

As we come to the end of April, we also come to the end of Stress Awareness Month. April has been celebrated as Stress Awareness Month every year since 1992, however this year it feels particularly important. In a recent study by the American Psychological Association, nearly half of parents (48%) said their level of stress has increased as a result of the pandemic. Stress is a natural part of life, but when not managed properly, it can lead to long-term emotional and physical side effects, outlined by WebMD here. As part of our Wellness Wednesday series, Touchplan decided to compile some of the best ways to manage and reduce stress. 

Exercise

Physical activity helps increase the production of endorphins and reduces levels of stress hormones, such as cortisol and adrenaline. Regular exercise is known to improve self-image and self-confidence. Exercise routines also help maintain mental fitness, improving alertness and concentration, and enhancing overall cognitive function. Scientists have also found that physical activity can also help to improve sleep.  The Mayo Clinic looks deeper at the effects of exercise on sleep here. 

Meditate

Meditation is an age-old practice that has recently become one of the more popular methods of stress relief. Meditation can be part of your daily routine to help cope with and reduce stress. Through learning how to calm your body and mind, physical and emotional stress can melt away. Meditation affects the body in the exact opposite way that stress does — by prompting the body’s relaxation response. VerywellMind has an overview of meditation here. If you are interested in learning how to meditate, Calm is a mobile app with many guided meditations for beginners. 

Eat Well 

Maintaining a proper diet can counterbalance the impact of stress by strengthening the immune system, stabilizing mood, and reducing blood pressure. Some important nutrients for stress reduction are Vitamin C, which reduces stress and boosts the immune system; complex carbohydrates, which induce serotonin production and stabilize blood pressure; magnesium, which helps avoid fatigue and improves sleep; Omega-3 fatty acids, which reduce surges of stress hormones and protect against depression. You can find additional suggestions for more stress-fighting foods here. 

Sleep 

Stress and sleep have a two-way relationship. Stress can lead to sleep loss, and sleep loss can increase stress. Stress often increases how long it takes to fall asleep, affects REM and deep sleep negatively, and leads to increased nighttime awakenings. A great way to reduce nighttime stress is by establishing a consistent sleep schedule. This helps waking up in the morning, sleeping soundly, and reducing the amount of sleep needed. Sleepscore has more tips on improving sleep to reduce stress here. 

While there are many other ways to manage and reduce stress, these are some of the most frequently recommended tips. Stress is an inevitable part of life, and can even be healthy, but it must be managed properly. 

If you missed out last wellness post be sure to read Five Healthy Habits to Incorporate into Your Springtime Routine and be sure to check back every other Wednesday for another #WellnessWednesday blog post!

Revisiting the Five Big Ideas Transforming the Design and Construction Industry: Adopting the Five Big Ideas on Your CM/GC Projects (Part 9)

(Hal Macomber, EVP, Touchplan with Layne Hess, Corporate Director of Planning, Scheduling, and Lean, Jacobsen Construction) We never intended the five big ideas would be the basis for a special delivery model, Lean Integrated Project Delivery (IPD). We proposed practices that could apply to all project delivery approaches. But, it didn’t happen that way. For the most part, the #FiveBigIdeas have not been embraced in the design, bid, build world. That is now changing.

Layne and I recently spoke about Jacobsen Construction’s success in adopting the Last Planner System of Production Control® (LPS). He describes Jacobsen as a “medium growth” company with a focus on diversifying its markets. Three years ago, the management team decided to use the LPS on all their projects. They went from three projects using LPS to all projects — 70 of them — in just over a year. Jacobsen used Touchplan on all of them. Oh, and Layne is a one-man team for planning, scheduling, and Lean. We can all learn from how he did that.

But first, a few words about Jacobsen Construction. Jacobsen was named the top contractor in Utah for seven of the last eight years. Why? One reason is they don’t just take care of their clients. They take care of their people and their trade partners. Not in a paternalistic way, with an outward mindset … they treat people as people. They show respect; expect respect, and take care of each other while they take care of the company and their clients. 

Layne says, “Start with why (the purpose) and keep it present throughout the project.” People know the purpose and keep the purpose present in their conversations and their thinking. “We have the crucial conversations in an elegant way to protect the process and communicate how you’re doing that.” This is just the beginning of the story.

Operating the project as a network of commitments starts with “why.” In the LPS, trade partner foremen — last planners — make promises to each other as customers to put work in place. While the promises are tied to the phase plan milestones, it’s the purpose of the project that gives importance to the reliability of those commitments. Making reliable promises is essential for achieving flow. Due to the compounding of variation with dependence — one missed commitment cascades to missed commitments for others — the percent promises complete (PPC) metric needs to stay above 80% to achieve the milestone date for the construction phase. Layne has helped the company raise the average PPC across 70 projects by 14 points in just six weeks. He did this with the analytics from Touchplan Insights coupled with the teams’ efforts at promising reliably — learning from action + project as a network of commitments + outward mindset.

Layne also knows the power of the progress principle — the single most important factor for achieving any challenging goal is the participants must see their efforts result in progress. Layne has teams use interim milestones — at least once every four weeks in every phase plan — as mile-markers along the way to see that they’re making progress. This works equally well for putting work in place as it does for increasing the participation of the last planners — learning from action + optimizing the project as a whole + outward mindset.

Plan your adoption of the five big ideas just like you plan your projects.

Jacobsen is serious about bringing people along with them. Layne said, “We did the Villego Last Planner® simulation with all the trades. We take on the responsibility to bring others along, helping the trades improve, too.” We called that the outward mindset. He calls it doing the right thing.

Do you want better project outcomes? Plan your adoption of the five big ideas just like you plan your projects. Use a phase pull planning approach. Add interim milestones to engage the progress principle. Do it in Touchplan and you’ll keep it visible, make it collaborative, and have the data analytics from Touchplan Insights to focus the teams’ efforts on data-informed improvements. In no time you’ll be as successful as Layne has been at adopting the Last Planner System®.

You can learn more about Jacobsen’s success with the Last Planner System® by reading Using Data to Drive Growth by Digitizing the Planning Process. For additional information on how Last Planner® and technology come together please see How Software Impacts Projects and Data & Analytics Training that Empowers the Whole Team; Layne hess helped develop this dashboard that played a role in his success. 

If you missed last week’s post be sure to check out Pursue Project Outcomes at the Intersection of the Five Big Ideas.

If you would like to revisit any of the posts from the Revisiting the Five Big Ideas series you can find all of them below.

So You Want to be a Superintendent…Thoughts from a Touchplan Team Member Who Worked in the Construction Industry

All of us have a general routine for our workday.  For some, you can pin it down to the minute.  Others, you just know that you’re going to try to get away and eat lunch somewhere in the middle of the day.  For me, I found that sticking with a routine that allowed for flexibility was the most productive.  There was always variance, and things seldom go exactly as planned, but having a few key milestones during the day and being prepared for the occasional curveball is an essential part to keep a project moving forward.  

0600: Arrive at Jobsite 

We normally gather at the coffee pot, talk with other supers and FEs. Our Vice President usually got there before everyone else to make the coffee.  His first act of the day was one of service to the rest of the team.  I found it admirable.  It comes with the leadership territory. It also enabled him to shape the environment and the job, instead of being shaped by everyone else’s priorities.  I think leaders should get there early enough to get the coffee going for everyone else.  If your day is going to be packed and fast-paced, give yourself some space to get collected and focus on what’s most important.   

0630: Gather Essentials for the Field   

The necessary items for me: Water bottle, coffee cup, iPad, and 4”x6” Rite in the Rain notebook.  Every job is busy to start the day.  Trades making their way to assembly areas, delivery trucks lining up to drop off material, cranes firing up.  It’s cool to see and feel a jobsite come alive.   

0700: Toolbox Talk 

Toolbox Talks are certainly becoming more prominent.  There’s value here so long as they’re done well. I have been a part of some good ones and bad ones.  The best take about 15 minutes and the lead foreman has spent some time beforehand thinking about the tasks ahead and hazards that accompany it. The paper JHA is 90% filled out, and the JHA board is mostly done. Communication is concise and direct to those performing the work and the team is engaged enough to give relevant suggestions or feedback.  The worst toolbox talks are where the leader incites the team to rattle off buzzwords so he can write them on a JHA board; most of which don’t apply to the tasks at hand.  For example, if someone calls out ‘100% tie-off’, and we’re installing site lighting conduit at 24” with a trencher; chances are this morning meeting is not effective. 

For me, the real value was that I got to know the crews and they got to know me. If you’re a field engineer or junior superintendent, I think crews appreciate it when you attend their morning meeting so long as you don’t railroad the thing.  They see you and get the opportunity to size you up.  Mostly, I’d keep my mouth shut until the end and the foreman invited me to say something.  Even then, I tried to keep it brief and encouraging.  I would discuss something positive to talk about, but if there was something the crew needed to do better I would state the problem and ask them for input on how to fix it.  Sometimes I got great feedback, other times not so much.  Either way, it is more effective than a one-way downhill conversation. Mutual engagement is key.   

Time to get to work.  Foremen line out their crews and start work while I take a trip around the jobsite to sign permits.

0800-0815: Daily Huddle.  

Some of you may be questioning why I did it at 8 AM. My thought was that the team had an opportunity to get their crews going and were still fresh enough to give good input.  No one had any reason to ‘smell the barn’ at the end of the day.  Maybe someone has some data or a convincing vignette to explain why an afternoon huddle is better. I’m all ears.  Either way, like the toolbox talk these meetings can be incredibly effective or wasteful.  It’s all up to the superintendent in charge and how they run the meeting.    

For us, the policy was a no-kidding minute-by-minute breakdown and it was clear to all participants that it was paramount to adhere to this.   No cell phones, no chairs, and tangential conversations were recorded on a ‘parking lot’ board to discuss later.  The purpose of this meeting is to status work, identify constraints, and do a bit of collaboration across trades to get ahead of potential issues.  When I was first learning about Last Planner®, I was told that this morning huddle was the ‘secret sauce’ and  I completely agree, so long as the rest of the system is adhered to equally as much.  You need a solid phase plan from which to build a look-ahead to build a weekly work plan and so on. This is why I think understanding and building the framework for LPS is only 10% of the battle.  The rest is the discipline in execution.  Was mine always 100% tight?  Nope, but I know we saw the most success when we stuck to the program.  

0830-1130: Let’s Call this a Mixed Bag

Ideally, I could spend this time focusing on safety, quality, and coordinating jobsite logistics.  Putting out fires and managing conflict is always a part of the job, however, I found that I was able to be less of a fireman the more I stuck to the ‘program’.   This was also a good time for Pre-install meetings, OAC, or long-range planning.  

1130: Lunch.  

On a good day, someone would have a lunch meeting.  Lots of times, this would turn into a general discussion amongst the other field staff about what’s going on the jobsite.   More often than not, I ate lunch on the go as I was working. I’d grab something off the food truck and get in a bite between phone calls.  For a period of time, most of my meals came on tortillas.  Barbacoa and pastor tacos washed down with a Mexican Coke can make any day go better.  

1215 – 4:30: Time to get Back After It.  

Mostly to plan and coordinate for my next day’s 0830 – 1130 time slot.  Really, the focus was on setting up for the next day. Are logistics in place, or anything new that changed the plan from this morning’s meeting? Are we going to be ready for the concrete pour tomorrow night?  

4:30: The Final Stretch 

Trades are wrapping up and getting things in order for the next day.  I’m working my way back to the office to do my own wrap-up before I start the drive home.  

5:00: Time to Pack it Up

Trades are gone, time to head home. Wait.  Daily Report. I’d go through my notebook and Touchplan to capture the story of the jobsite for that day. 

So that’s it. I think having a few hard and fast items that build a structure to your day followed by time slots dedicated to being flexible was the approach that worked for me and one I would recommend.  Days of back-to-back meetings may certainly feel productive, but are they really?  Does your typical day look different from what mine did?  Let me know!  Maybe I can learn something.  [email protected]

Revisiting The Five Big Ideas Transforming the Design and Construction Industry: Pursue Project Outcomes at the Intersections of the Five Big Ideas (Part 8)

(Hal Macomber, EVP, Touchplan with Calayde Davey, Ph.D., Research Associate, University of Pretoria, South Africa ) So, maybe the five big ideas are not so big anymore. (Did I say that?) 17 years ago we made a bold claim that the five big ideas would transform the industry. We had no idea that they would be adopted as one basis for the relational contract and delivery method that we now call Integrated Project Delivery. We also see evidence throughout the industry of giving high importance for collaboration and early trade contractor involvement for design assist to optimize the project as a whole. We also see those teams who use the Last Planner System® of Production Control use the name trade partners respectfully rather than subcontractors and they help the trades make reliable promises to other trades seeing each other as their customers. 

While for many years we gave emphasis on bringing about the behaviors or practices of the five big ideas, we were always after something else. Our client-owners wanted solutions, not just practices. Specifically, they wanted more competitive projects, high-trust environments, reliability in outcomes, continuous improvement, and innovation. Each of these outcomes sit at the intersection of two of the five big ideas.

  • Competitive solutions — really collaborate + optimize the project as a whole
  • Continuous improvement — optimize the whole + couple learning with action
  • Reliability of outcomes — couple learning with action + conduct projects as networks of commitments
  • Building trust — conduct projects as networks of commitments + bring an outward mindset
  • Innovation — bring an outward mindset + really collaborate

The above outcomes don’t just happen. And, if you’re not looking for them, then you may miss that they are available. While we claimed that the outcomes could be found at the intersection of the big ideas, we saw those intersecting practices as necessary conditions but not sufficient conditions. For instance, if you are looking for competitive solutions you need more than the intersecting actions of real collaboration and optimization of the whole project. We reasonably can expect that the timing of collaboration matters — neither too early nor too late — along with clear conditions of satisfaction and aspirational goals as targets for optimization. Miss any of those and you won’t have competitive solutions. Similarly, for the other four desired outcomes there are insufficient conditions that could prevent the outcomes from being realized.

Calayde points to the Eiffel Tower as an example of a client-owner who was (only) interested in a temporary gateway for an international exposition. Instead, the designers brought forth inspiration, ambition, with collaboration to design the tallest of all structures in the world (at that time) and an icon of possibility to this day. Our owner-clients deserve no less.

While our client-owners may be more focused on their business cases for their projects, the desired outcomes are central to the realization of their goals. The five big ideas practices are the building blocks for creating the conditions for realizing those desired outcomes.

 We’d be remiss not to characterize our adoption of the five big ideas and the pursuit of the desired outcomes as ambitious. More appropriately, we’re speaking about profound change at a system level. But don’t be scared of that. You know the drill. 

  • Set a challenge. 
  • Grasp the current condition. 
  • Set an ambitious interim target condition. 
  • Experiment to learn what works better.

As you adopt change, look out for unintended consequences. Our best intentions invariably can lead to poor outcomes. Also, remember that we’re after improvement at the project level. Beware of improving locally at the expense of project-level improvements. If system (project) performance didn’t improve, then the change wasn’t effective.

Yes, the five big ideas are still transforming the design and construction industry. Adopt them to bring more value to your clients, your teams, and your company.

If you missed our last installment please read Project Production Thinking Behind the Five Big Ideas. For additional posts regarding the value of data as it relates to adjustments to action please see Your Data should Work for You Not the Other Way Around. Additionally to see some collaboration and client solutions you can read Building a Partnership for Today and Beyond.

If you would like to revisit any of the posts from the Revisiting the Five Big Ideas series you can find all of them below.

 

Five Healthy Habits to Incorporate Into Your New Springtime Routine

As the light at the end of the COVID-19 tunnel shines brighter and brighter, many of us are emerging with an increased awareness of the importance of preserving our physical and mental health. This past winter, many struggled to maintain a healthy lifestyle as people steered away from indoor exercise spaces and only got outside on the sunniest of days. As we enter springtime, Touchplan has collected some helpful habits to think about incorporating into your spring routine as we all strive to live healthier, happier lives.

Spring Cleaning

Spring cleaning has taken on greater importance this year as opposed to the annual cleaning of the pantry. In a Parsley Health article, MD Robin Berzin says doing a thorough spring-cleaning of your home has a number of health benefits. A clean house can improve breathing and prevent respiratory issues, minimizes the spread of viruses and bacteria, and reduces the risk of injury in the household. Spring cleaning has cognitive benefits, too. Tidying up your living/workspace will make your mind clearer and decrease stress and depression. For some housekeeping resources and tips, check out cleanmama.com

Get up and Get Out!

Springtime means the sun is rising earlier, which means mornings are warming up. Getting up early has many health benefits, including increased energy and happiness and decreased stress levels. In addition, being outside lowers blood pressure, improves focus, and promotes graceful aging. Start your mornings with a walk or run to make the most of your day. SleepAdvisor goes into more detail on the benefits of rising early. You can find more here.

Go Green!

With winter in the rearview mirror, it’s time to swap the heavy comfort foods like soups and stews for lighter meals that reflect the seasonal change! As greenery emerges all around us, try to incorporate more and more of it into your daily diet. Spring is accompanied by farmer’s markets and farm stands that are beginning to open. Take a walk or drive to the nearest one and stock up on the season’s latest produce. Look here for the best farmer’s markets in Massachusetts.

Boost your Brain!

Feeling good requires attention to both your physical and mental health, and the two are inextricably intertwined. This spring, take time to assess your diet and make sure you are getting enough of the foods that aid cognitive functioning. Some of these “smart” foods include fatty fish containing omega-3, berries that contain antioxidants, and green tea. For a more comprehensive list of brain-boosting foods, read here. You can also find brain training games to help boost cognitive performance on the Elevate App, free for download for Android and IOS.

Be Sure to Get Enough Sleep

According to the CDC, one in three adults don’t get enough sleep. The CDC also states that  a lack of sleep can be linked to type 2 diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and depression. Some tips for high-quality sleep include getting up and going to sleep at the same time every day, keeping the bedroom quiet and dark, and avoiding large meals and caffeine before bed. For more guidance on how to improve your sleep schedule, read here.

Make sure to check back every other Wednesday for a new #WellnessWednesday post!

Revisiting The Five Big Ideas Transforming the Design and Construction Industry: Project Production Thinking Behind the Five Big Ideas (Part 7)

(Hal Macomber, EVP, Touchplan with Adam Hoots, Operation Innovation, Langston) The Five Big Ideas Transforming Design and Construction were proposed in 2004 to a group of people in Northern California who were already embracing project-based production thinking. In 1999, the Lean Construction Institute published a few white papers on production theory as it applied to projects as did numerous researchers and academics in the International Group for Lean Construction (IGLC). Still, as people adopted phase pull planning from 2004 – 2007, production laws faded from the planning conversations. This is in spite of the near-ubiquitous use of the Parade of Trades® and the Lego® airplane production simulations in all Lean construction training. It wasn’t until I introduced This Is Lean, Resolving the Efficiency Paradox at the 2015 Lean Design and Construction Congress in Boston that production theory was back in the conversation. That simple theory consisted of three parts: 1) flow over resource efficiency, 2) visualization and 3) continuous improvement.

Three of the five big ideas are directly affected by the appropriate use of production thinking. They are “optimize the project as a whole,” “tightly couple learning with action,” and “conduct the project as networks of commitments”. The production theory issues are the same for all three. It has to do with Taiichi Ohno’s lesson,

Flow when you can; pull when you can’t.

Adam says, “Pursuing flow is paramount on projects! Projects must project purpose!” Whenever flow is broken all three of the above big ideas are impacted. Flow and pull break when production laws are not followed. Let’s start with the biggest villain, the blind practice of launching work on the master (critical path method) schedule per the planned start date. (In CPM-speak, pulling work to the data date.) This violates Little’s Law. In short, the more work we launch the further behind we get. When work-in-process rises without an appropriate increase in the workforce, then the overall duration increases.

The second large mistake we make is taking our eyes off the bottlenecks. A change anywhere in the process other than at the bottleneck will not improve the production rate. Letting the bottleneck move around only makes it worse! Find the bottleneck and then use them to pace the flow through that phase of work.

Third, uncontrolled variation makes the project a crapshoot. There are three important measures we use in the Last Planner System of Production Control® that directly relate to minimizing variation.

  1. Percent plan complete (PPC) — an improvement measure of the reliability of completing work items as promised (planned). Due to the compounding of variation with dependence, PPC must be greater than 70% to get timely milestone completion.
  2. Milestone completion — a key performance indicator for overall timely completion of the project.
  3. Making work ready — reliably addressing all of the roadblocks and constraints to starting and finishing work items as promised.

For all three metrics, the percent isn’t the interesting thing about the measures. It’s the difference between the metric and 100% that is interesting. In other words, learn from the delta. Understanding what is driving the variation allows us to focus on continuous improvement.

Adam notes, “CPM would work if we focused on flow.” That requires very quick feedback loops from what we set out to do and what happened. Without data-informed action, we get further off track. Adam says, “It’s the smallest details or misunderstandings in commitment keeping that takes us astray.” End of shift/day commitment management stand-ups among the last planners provides the “steering” to keep production flowing.

Whether we practice CPM Scheduling, Takt Planning, Last Planner System®, Pull Planning, or 3-week look-aheads, the point is that our teams must learn to focus on flow efficiency in lieu of resource efficiency. Once teams understand flow, the team will then be able to learn through visualization. Improvement of flow efficiency is what we all seek within our projects, sometimes WE just have a tough time verbalizing that. You’ll get the best outcomes when the five big ideas build on flow.

For more insights on Project Production Thinking you can read Data Driven Decisions Drive Better Project Management, or Takt Time Planning and Laws of Production: Getting the Most out of LPS.

If you would like to revisit any of the posts from the Revisiting the Five Big Ideas series you can find all of them below.

Mass Timber Poised to Dominate the Sustainable Construction Industry

Mass Timber Construction continues to be a growing sustainable construction trend with the potential for exponential growth. This post is a quick introduction to Mass Timber: what it is, why it’s growing in popularity, and what it means for different segments of our industry. Along the way, we’ll point out some of the benefits of Mass Timber that have us so excited and highlight the industry trends that can accelerate Mass Timber adoption.

Mass Timber is another structural material Owners, Designers & Contractors can choose to build with at its most basic level. For example, before Mass Timber, a typical building might have steel columns and beams and floors made of metal decking topped with concrete slabs. Mass Timber can replace those steel columns and beams with engineered wood elements like glue-laminated timber (Gluelams) and replace the decking with cross-laminated timber (CLTs). It can get more complicated than this, but in a nutshell, the key concept is that new engineered wood products are available for use in place of existing products made from other materials, and using these materials can offer several benefits.

Mass Timber Decreases the Carbon Footprint

A clear win for using more wood and less concrete and steel in buildings is that it can drastically lower the carbon footprint and increase sustainability. Cement (a key ingredient in concrete) and steel both require a lot of heat in the manufacturing process, and each has a large carbon footprint. Estimates vary but taken together; these two materials account for about 15% of global CO2 emissions annually. Compare this to wood that prevails on the carbon front in two ways.

  • The energy used to produce Mass Timber is far less than the energy used in steel and cement production.
  • Trees take CO2 out of the atmosphere, sequestering it in the wood.

As trees are harvested for the sustainably-produced wood products used in Mass Timber, new trees are planted. Younger, vigorously growing trees remove more carbon than older mature ones. The net result is, with properly managed forests, this CO2 sequestration can go on indefinitely.

Lighter Wood Reduces Construction Costs

Beyond sustainability, Mass Timber is also having a positive impact on costs and schedules. Wood is a lighter material than steel and concrete. That means potential cost savings from things such as smaller foundations, fewer ground improvements needed with insufficient load-bearing soil, and smaller cranes for erecting the structure. Also, Mass Timber projects can take advantage of the trend towards off-site prefabrication. This results in fewer components that need to be erected on-site, and the components themselves can come with things like MEP penetrations already in place. This results in less work to be performed on-site, which leads to a shorter schedule.

Mass Timber Market Adoption

With so many positives, you might be wondering why Mass Timber hasn’t already taken over the market. The answer is that it takes a great deal of time, money, and experience to build up all the infrastructure needed to adopt new building techniques. There is a need for design teams that can design for Mass Timber, BIM tools that can model Mass Timber, insurance carriers willing to underwrite projects, factories that can produce Mass Timber, etc.

The good news is that this process is well underway. Over the past decade, as more Mass Timber projects have been built, the needed infrastructure has developed and grown. Swinerton, for example, has an entire division focused on Mass Timber. A couple of their notable projects include the

First Tech Federal Credit Union in Oregon, completed in 2018 and consisting of an impressive 156,000 SF. They’re currently working on the Ascent in Milwaukee, an even larger project at 25 stories and 273,000 SF.

Across the industry, we see many of our friends and customers are completing Mass Timber projects, building up their expertise, and are taking on larger and more impressive projects. The building codes are keeping up with this trend, and recent changes enable taller Mass Timber structures.

With Mass Timber projects being sustainable, cost-effective, and beautiful, owners are increasingly picking Mass Timber for their projects. Atlassian and Google are two great owner examples. Both of these owners are in the software industry, and we use their products to help us build Touchplan. Atlassian is building a new

Headquarters in Sydney that will rise to 40 stories, while Google recently announced a new 180,000 SF Mass Timber office building for  Sunnyvale.

It’s rather apparent that Mass Timber is a trend poised to move from the pilot stage to a high growth stage. We’d love to hear about your experience with Mass Timber. Drop us a line, and maybe we’ll even feature one of your projects in a future blog post!

Revisiting The Five Big Ideas Transforming the Design and Construction Industry: Bring an Outward Mindset to all Interactions (Part 6)

(Hal Macomber, EVP, Touchplan with Mark Jussaume, VP, Office Director, SmithGroup) Some of the most important decisions are taken at the early stages of projects. This is true when we bring architects and engineers together for conceptual and schematic design. It’s true when a general contractor assembles trade partner foremen together for the first phase pull planning. To get the most out of these sessions care must be taken to tap the available perspectives, expertise, and judgments. Otherwise, we fall short of what we could be doing for our clients. The challenge is larger as we pursue industry-wide change. In 2004 when we wrote the Five Big Ideas Transforming the Design and Construction Industry we claimed,

The chief impediment to transforming the design and delivery of capital projects is an insufficient relatedness of project participants. Participants need to develop relationships founded on trust if they are to share their mistakes as learning opportunities for their project, and all the other projects.

While the industry made great strides, the challenge remains. Change the people to change the projects and the industry.

My Prior Guidance for “Intentionally Build Relationships on Projects”

Whether you are a leader or team member see to it that you take the time upfront to build your team. What does that take? Try these five steps:

  1. Explore each others’ personal intentions and ambitions. Projects offer sufficient opportunities to take care of individual needs and desires. We just need to find out what they are. Then bring those intentions into alignment with the promise of the project.
  2. Cultivate practices of commitment-making. At the very first opportunity begin practices of making promises in front of each other. This practice provides a factual basis for making assessments of trustworthiness and care for the team.
  3. Make it your habit to acknowledge and appreciate team members. Become a mutual admiration society. High-performing teams are characterized as environments where people are acknowledged at least once every seven days for the talents, efforts, and contributions each team member brings.
  4. Foster an environment for healthy conflict. Encourage team members to express alternate views. Even in the face of the agreement have someone create a different perspective.
  5. Make the project setting a place where people can be their authentic selves without fear of judgment or mockery. Granting each other their legitimacy is the basis for the healthiest of relationships.

Our New Guidance for Bringing an Outward Mindset to our Projects

Perhaps you’ve made the statement, “change behavior and you’ll change results.” My prior guidance only focused on the actions we want from people. That was good as far as it went, but it was not far enough. When we change our minds, we change our actions.

Mark Jussaume leads the Boston office for SmithGroup. The people in that office stand out in their community, markets, and on their projects for bringing an outward mindset to their interactions with each other and those on their projects. In this mindset, we see people as people, with their own wants and needs, expertise and perspectives, purposes and ambitions, and cares and concerns. This contrasts with an inward mindset where we have our attention only on those issues for ourselves. When we’re inward others appear as objects or obstacles in our way. Mark says,

Bringing an outward mindset to projects is a force multiplier for changing behaviors.

It starts with caring enough about others to be helpful. That entails:

  • See people as people, as a human, with goals and aspirations like me.
  • Be considerate, helpful, attentive, and thoughtful.
  • Be curious around others. Suspend advocacy in favor of inquiry.
  • Take accountability for your impact on others.
  • Take care of others while you take care of yourself.
  • It’s an “our work” disposition.

We move from outward to inward when we become self-focused.

  • “When we turn inward,” Mark says, “we tend to behave in ways that are less helpful such as subtly holding back information or we don’t bring up issues that might make us look bad.”
  • “Other people become vehicles to get what we want, obstacles in our way or even irrelevant to us. We start to think in terms of “my work” as opposed to “our work”.

Some people might confuse an outward mindset with simply being kind or pleasant to work with. Having an outward mindset means that other people matter like I matter and by conceiving our work in this way we can achieve amazing results for ourselves and others.

Now, look back at the above five recommendations I made. Notice that each one of them is easier in an outward mindset — we are taking care of ourselves and the client — than the inward mindset — I need to have a productive work session. It’s also true that bringing about the conditions for conducting projects as high-functioning networks of commitments — a no-blame, learning-first, one for all, and all for one environment — is possible when we turn our mind outward. (See last week’s post, Conduct Projects as Networks of Commitments.)

Bringing an outward mindset requires practice for it to be always available. It takes work. For us, it’s the work of choosing, again and again, to be outward. The behaviors just follow.

Learn more about an outward mindset from this delightful 10-minute video Why I [Wish I Could] Hate Arbinger and from Arbinger’s books, The Outward Mindset: Seeing Beyond Ourselves, Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box, The Anatomy of Peace: Resolving the Heart of Conflict.

To see the outward mindset in action, read the Sparrow Hospital Case Study. You’ll see the outward mindset that the Granger Construction team brought to the renovation and how that mindset permeated to everyone else involved. Learn how you can get more value from Touchplan by using Custom Fields and how they make tracking progress on repetitive scopes easier; written by Andrew Piland from our Sales Engineering team. If you missed last week’s post, be sure to read Conduct Construction Projects as a Network of Commitments.

If you would like to revisit any of the posts from the Revisiting the Five Big Ideas series you can find all of them below.

Revisiting The Five Big Ideas Transforming the Design and Construction Industry: Conduct Construction Projects as a Network of Commitments (Part 5)

(Hal Macomber, EVP, Touchplan with Connor Butler, Managing Principal, Relevate) An uninterrupted flow of value-adding work product is within the reach of every superintendent or project manager operating on the Last Planner System of Production Control®. Three new practices are necessary. First, there must be a practice for project performers to continuously update their promises and declare complete. The second practice is a system that calls attention to the action required to keep the promises that are outstanding. The third practice is the development of the project organization so people are in a position to declare breakdowns and initiate compensating action.

My 2010 Guidance on “Conducting the Project as Networks of Commitments”

A project is a single-purpose network of commitments performed by a temporary social system. Unlike recurring business processes, the networks of commitments on a project emerge rather than are designed are designed and then evolve. Networks are refined as performers have experience. Performers in a project get one shot through the network. To complicate this project performers come together as strangers. They often lack experience with each other’s reliability to perform within the network. Without the experience with each other, project performers will hold out on making their best commitments.

Your role as project leader is to activate the network of commitment on your project. Here are four actions you can take:

  • Set an example of making offers (promises) that take care of the concerns and needs of project performers. People will follow your example.
  • Encourage project performers to negotiate offers and promises that they can reliably deliver. Help them as needed to improve on reliability.
  • Be a good customer for the promises made on your project by offering your help to performers and announcing your anticipation of completion.
  • Be quick to show your appreciation for the completion of promises including being notified at completion rather than at the next project team meeting.

These actions begin to bring project performers together as team members who are taking care of each other while they take care of the project. Doing this publicly provides the basis for people to develop trust in each other’s competence and reliability to perform. And it is just the beginning. Your role as project leader requires continued attention to the functioning of the network of commitments.

Our New Guidance to “Conduct Projects as Networks of Commitments”

Project leaders must continue activating the networks of commitment as stated in my previous guidance. Collectively, the above four practices support performers to make reliable promises. I struck the above text “network of commitments emerges rather than designed.” Design occurs in a process the Lean construction community calls phase pull planning. Evolution occurs by teams managing the promises in the network with a “practice” of making commitments with the intent to improve as the project progresses.

Design and Negotiate the Conditions of Satisfaction for the Phase

Pull planning starts by defining the milestone that completes the phase. This is a collaborative conversation among the project performers for the phase. They engage with each other in the customer mindset — the next performer in the sequence is my customer. The conversation establishes a clear statement of the conditions of satisfaction (COS) that are to be achieved at the milestone.

COS are nouns and adjectives, not verbs and adverbs. We often give names to COS. For instance, two all-beef patties, Special Sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun is a list of ingredients (nouns) that when assembled is called a Big Mac. For the construction phase that we call “overhead rough-in,” the COS may include:

  • Ready for third-party inspection,
  • Material installed in accordance with the building information model,
  • No pipe insulation where heat trace is installed,
  • Fire sprinkler capped without heads,
  • Ductwork openings covered with plastic,
  • Etc.

Often in Lean, we call establishing COS reaching “strong agreement on the what and how.”

Managing Promises with the Last Planner System®

The difference between the Last Planner System of Production Control® and traditional scheduling is the negotiation that can take place between the Construction Manager/Owner and the performers. Reliable promises are the responsibility of the requestors and the performers. Our aim is to agree not to commit to unrealistic requests just because a schedule says it should start. When we make promises, particularly those that we deem in the making as reliable promises, we expect that people will keep those promises. However, the future is not just uncertain, it is unknowable. Not keeping a promise might be the best action to take for the project. For instance, if the promise to install plumbing in cabinets can’t be kept due to an illness, we don’t want the countertops installed. Doing so would harm the project. We say manage the project promises to respond appropriately to the changing conditions we encounter.

Make it Easy to Update Promises and Report Completions

Managing promises starts with making it easy for project performers to continuously update their promises and report completions. This is typically done at an end-of-shift stand-up meetings with the last planners (trade partner foremen). It’s best done in the location where the phase plan work is performed. It’s done at the end-of-shift to minimize the delay or lag in sharing and responding to the day’s performance. This gives the team the time overnight to make compensating adjustments before the start of work the following morning. Other project stakeholders can know and respond to the outcomes when you electronically capture the completions and adjustments to promises along with reasons for any variation.

Develop Your System to Call Attention to Opportunities for Improvements

We also want to engage in practices that call attention to the action required to keep the promises that are outstanding. While we set out to make promises that can be kept, we can encounter unforeseen circumstances. Materials deliveries can be delayed; field conditions may be different than specified; production staff may be unavailable; equipment can breakdown; the workspace may be unavailable. And there can be a pattern to these emergent conditions. Standard practice is to measure the performers’ commitments via percent plan (promises) complete (PPC). The best practices for high-functioning networks of commitments are to measure the reliability of enabling work such as materials, RFI’s, and submittals along with investigating the promises that are missed.

Timely production data that is tracked and analyzed will aid the team to make improvements to their system and practices.

Develop the Project Organization to Take Care of Each Other and the Project

Last, we won’t hear about the problems people see and encounter if they don’t speak about them. We must develop the project organization so people are in a position to and will declare breakdowns and initiate compensating action. We use the word “breakdown” to mean any condition that would interrupt or keep us from completing a commitment. We often see trades, acting in a spirit of “minding their own business,” fail to speak about something they see about another trade’s work. We also see trades not report problems they have with their own work. Instead, they see a problem — fix the problem — move on to the next problem. The networks of commitments are fragile when those patterns prevail.

We need a no-blame, learning-first, one for all and all for one environment for high-functioning networks of commitments. Creating this starts with project leaders and trade partner supervisors and entails everyone on the project.

Closing in on Uninterrupted Flow

The combination of promising reliably, designing the milestone conditions of satisfaction, and managing promises create a basis for designing production systems that follow sound production laws and that are robust to the remaining breakdowns in the project setting. This brings us closer to the lean thinking ideal of uninterrupted flow. It’s there for your taking.

If you missed last week’s post, be sure to read Optimize the Project as a Whole If you would like to learn more about the Last Planner System®, please see Data Driven Decisions for Better Project Management or visit our case study about our work with Jacobsen.

If you would like to revisit any of the posts from the Revisiting the Five Big Ideas series, you can find all of them below.