Real Life Lean 040

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 - Owners Should Embrace the LCI-CPC for Teams and Their Partners

• Lean Podcast - Managing Risk, Money and Most Important Relationships with James Glass

• Lean Event - Principles of Target Value Delivery (TVD)

• Real Life Lean - Managers (Don’t) Always Know Best

Lean Article

What value does the LCI-CPC hold? In the article below we hear from an owner at Massport (Massachusetts Port Authority) about the value they place on lean practices and the value that the LCI-CPC will hold for their projects moving forward. I find it interesting that not only are owners looking for this certification within the companies they work with, but they are also exploring this certification for their internal teams.

Takeaway - As the author mentions below, I think we will start to see LCI-CPC start to hold similar weight as other professional certifications such as PMP and other engineering specific registrations. I think this is a sign of a shift we are seeing in lean construction, where owners are now seeing the value that is being placed on lean and want to make sure the teams they are working with understand and utilize lean principles.

Lean Podcast

In this episode James Glass talks about his first lean experience and seeing how "forcing" lean was not working.  In his experience the best way to start is for teams to "pick the things that will make them successful".  Apply and modify lean tools to make your team successful.  James continues to talk about the value of building genuine relationships with the team

Takeaway - This podcast episode makes me think that relationships are the most important part of lean implementation and lean success. It is important to get to the core of the teams desires and needs and work to find a way to bring success and value to the whole team.

Lean Event

Target Value Delivery (TVD) is a key tool to have in one's lean construction tool belt. Knowing how to effectively use the tool, and the phases that make up TVD can be a challenge to learn. In the webinar below, Julie Glassmeyer will share the key phases and components of TVD and teach you how to use them to improve project success.

Takeaway - TVD can be a tough tool to learn for some, and I think attending a webinar such as this is a great way to gain an understanding of the process and learn how it can benefit your projects.

Real Life Lean - Lean practices in the real world

My team recently started a multiple month shutdown of a manufacturing facility. The planning for this shutdown has taken months and there have been multiple groups involved in the process. As part of this shutdown, portions of the facility will stay down while we bring back other areas to start production. This will require different PPE and controls as we progress through the project and was a major task that the management team focused on during our planning. We asked questions like "how can we best communicate this?" "What are the requirements in this space from date X to date Y?" and "Does this visual communication clearly outline our requirements?"

But we failed to be lean in one specific way - we did NOT include the end user.  We never asked someone from the production floor (client side or contractors doing work) if the signs made sense? We never thought to ask if they could clearly understand what was expected at them in this new flow path? We spent hours and hours of our time coming up with what we thought was the best system, and then put it into action.  Result - confusion and misunderstanding. Our phones were blowing up with people asking what was required here and what was not allowed over there.  We needed to step back, understand the issue and some to a collective resolution.

We were able to quickly make adjustments to our signage and flow paths based on feedback we received from the end users and get the facility back to its functioning state.  There were many lessons learned during this process, but it really highlighted one specific one to me.  Owners and managers can sit in the office all day and create as grand of plans as possible, but without feedback and input from the end users, they will not be perfect. It is so important to take the time to hear from the people doing the work and work together to find success.

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