Real Life Lean 029

Happy Monday lean construction family and welcome to another edition of Real Life Lean. This newsletter is intended to give construction professionals worldwide 4 quick and easy resources to grow and continue on your lean journey.

Today's Summary:

• Lean Article - Project Production Management: Bigger Batches Create Longer Projects 

• Lean Podcast - 90 Best Construction Podcasts

• Lean Event - Sundt Construction Demonstration - Ditching Spreadsheets For Real Time Data

• Real Life Lean - Always A Little Dissatisfied (And thats a good thing!)

Lean Article

We often talk about flow on a construction project. It is something every crew strives for and something a superintendent is always looking to improve upon. Human nature (and construction industry standard) is to give larger batches to crews at a time, and let them “have the whole space” to get work completed quicker. In our heads, it makes sense - the more work that crew A has complete, the more work crew B can get to when they start. The article below, article 5 in the Project Production Management Series, shows how this is a fallacy and how smaller batches make work move quicker.

Takeaway: At first this idea seemed counterintuitive to me, but after reading this article and looking at the breakdowns, it makes sense. By going smaller, we can go quicker. I think a major caveat to this is constraint management. If you are going to reduce your batch size, you MUST make sure your crews have the answers they need and material must be available.

Lean Podcast

Feedspot recently released its list of the “90” Best Construction Podcasts You Must Follow in 2023 and it was awesome to see some fantastic lean construction podcast being shared.

Takeaway: One of the main things I thought after checking out this list was “man, I didn’t know there were so many construction focused podcasts”. It is really exciting to see how much content is available for our industry and I can’t wait to check out more of these podcasts. I thought this was a great space to share this list and hopefully bring value to you! Congratulations to Elevate Construction for having 2 podcasts hit the list (Elevate Construction at #3 and Takt Construction at #34). Congratulations to The Lean Construction Blog for hitting the list at #36!

Lean Event

Spreadsheets. I don’t know about you, but I love a good spreadsheet that has formulas that work and data that flows. But I sure hate when one formula gets broken and you get nothing but error signs all over your sheet. In construction, we see this a lot. Spreadsheets are a common management tools that often rely on one to two people that know the inner workings of them. Check out the webinar below this Thursday to see how you can user newer technology such as TouchPlan to manage all your project details and ditch the spreadsheets.

Takeaway: Moving into a more technical world is great for the construction industry and getting rid of complex spreadsheets for simplified cloud based solutions will help us all. I am interested to see how Touchplan can be used to manage all project details. This is sure to be a great event.

Real Life Lean - Lean practices in the real world

When I find myself with some free time, I will open up a really cool lean tool that one of my coaches recommended to me - The Pocket Sensei. This book is a great tool full of 1-2 page exercises you can do to flex your lean thinking muscle. I love that you don’t have to follow it in order, you browse around and find a “kata” (kata means routine, practice or exercise) that fits your current situation.

This week I was skimming through the table of contents and came across a kata around dissatisfaction and personal development through dissatisfaction. The chapter opened with a story about how Toyota employees were often referred to as “always a little dissatisfied”. This dissatisfaction lead to a continuous improvement mindset and kept the employees from falling into a trap of “good enough”. The chapter then encourages the reader to spend time looking at your own daily routines and finding areas that you are “always a little dissatisfied” and encourages change.

With continuous improvement in mind, I encourage you to take this mindset of “always being a little dissatisfied” and take it back to your personal life. What daily routines can you improve upon? I will report back next week with my findings.

Have a Real Life Lean story you think would be a great feature in an upcoming newsletter? Send me an email at [email protected].