Real Life Lean 031

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: Pace Construction To Bring Sanity To Your Construction Project (Part 7)

• Lean Podcast - Mastering Effective Meetings In Construction With Evan Unger

• Lean Event - A Lean Method Eliminates Trade Damage On Metal Welded Frames

• Real Life Lean - Auditing My Weekly Meetings

Lean Article

Finding the right takt, or beat for your project plays a huge roll in keeping the flow moving on your site. With flow as our goal, our teams need to diligently work to get the project marching to the same beat. Pacing the production of the job site makes all the difference and ties all the production laws together (a constant pace removes variation, pace is set on the smallest practical batch of work, bottleneck operations control the pace, avoid delays from high capacity utilization and variation).

Takeaway: Learning to focus on leading a project to a specific takt can take some time and a bit of a cultural shift. It is important to work with your team to change the mindset from an "I" mindset to a “we” mindset. Have the crews think of the next crew coming into their space as their customer. This mindset helps ensure handoffs are understood and completed properly. As the article states, "switch from my work to our work.” Great things will happen when your team adopts this mindset.

Lean Podcast

Meetings are everyone’s favorite part of the day, right? In my opinion there is nothing worse in my day than a meeting that has no direction and no end goal. To the opposite effect, a well run meeting with clear direction and definitive goals, makes for a great meeting with a ton of value. In the podcast below Felipe Engineer-Manriquez talks Evan Unger about how good leaders run meetings, and how effective meetings are a skill you need to practice to get better at.

Takeaway: My main takeaway from this podcast episode was that an effective meeting takes effort. The scheduler of the meeting needs to be intentional about who is invited to the meeting and what each persons role in the meeting is. I really enjoyed the comparison of a meeting to a flight. You have the takeoff, the flight and the landing. Each portion of the flight needs to be planned and thought through for the whole thing to be successful.

Lean Event

Trade damage is the worst. It impacts your schedule, causes multiple forms of waste and overall becomes a pain to manage. All construction projects experience trade damage, and it has become part of the construction process. In the webinar below hosted by the Lean Construction Institute, attendees will learn how product from Qwickinstall can help eliminate trade damage to hollow metal frames, potentially saving your project time and money.

Takeaway: There are few things worse that trade damage to a door frame on a construction project. It usually comes close to turnover, and the hollow metal frame is kicked out of square. You now must open the drywall and repair or replace the frame. Couple that with the extremely long lead time on hollow metal frames and you have a recipe for a project disaster. With that in mind, I am all for a new approach to hollow metal frames, and look forward to hearing from the team at Qwickinstall.

Real Life Lean - Lean practices in the real world

After listening to the podcast that is linked above, I spent a little bit of time reflecting on the meetings I currently host and started looking for improvements. Here are some of my notes and some action items I am taking for myself as I move forward.

• Most meetings I had scheduled do not have an agenda. I have heard the phrase “No agenda = no attend-a” but for some reason in the hustle and bustle of this project, I have stopped adding agenda’s to my meeting invites. Action Item - Audit all future meetings I have an put an agenda to each meeting.

• No goals defined for the meetings. My current boss is leaving the project to pursue other opportunities. I inherited a lot of his recurring meetings, but I don’t quite know the goal of these meetings. Action item - talk to the main audience members and understand what the goal of these meetings is. Meetings should have intent.

• Clear audience. Do I have the right people in the room? Do I have too many people in the room? I noticed that a few meetings that I have scheduled have a broad audience. Once I lock in a better agenda, I should be able to shape the audience to the goal of the meeting.

• Plus/Deltas. I have been slacking on my use of plus/delta’s and am missing out on an opportunity for great feedback and continuous improvement. Action Item - start implementing plus/delta’s at meetings I host. Eventually see if we can get these to flow into other meetings

Here is continuous improvement in action. You don’t have to make huge changes or groundbreaking new tools. You just need to work towards getting better each and every day.

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