Real Life Lean 045

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 - How Pull Planning Makes You A Better Team Member

• Lean Podcast - Early Adopters 

• Lean Event - Foundations Of Theories Of Constraints (TOC)

• Real Life Lean - Be Lean For You Clients

Lean Article

If you’ve been practicing lean or interested in learning about lean construction, chances are very high that you’ve heard of Last Planner System. In the article linked below, the team at Nialli shares how pull planning is not only better for your project, but better for your team. 

Takeaway - I’m a huge fan of last planner system to help increase team communication and collaboration. But I’ve always thought of it as a project tool to get the job done on time.  I’ve never really thought about how the tool teaches us to be better team members.

Lean Podcast

In the podcast episode below Jason uses stories from early adopters in war technology to talk about the mindset he has around lean implementation. Identifying the goal of the system and innovating to better achieve that goal is what we are after. The early adopters in war were able to be better prepared and have more success than those that waited.

Takeaway: Don't be complacent with being the best at something, always look for ways to improve and ways to better achieve the goal. That is lean.

Lean Event

Taken from the webinar description “TOC is a management framework seeking the maximum leverage points in a system to improve throughput. Rami Goldratt, CEO of the Goldratt Group, will present a foundational overview of TOC and how it can lead to breakthroughs in difficult project environments.”

Takeaway: I am excited for this webinar because I think it focuses on a topic that is key to lean implementation and lean buy in. One of the main benefits of a truly lean operation is identifying constraints and removing these constraints. I think this webinar will view constraints from a different lens and help all attendees approach constraint management with a new minset.

Real Life Lean - Lean practices in the real world

Be lean for your clients.  This is a thought I had this week while working with my team on some stainless steel piping that we were fighting to get lined up correctly.  Our drawings called for a clamped connected with a gasket at the connection to seal to pipes. This was in a particularly tight area of the mechanical room that we were all looking forward to getting out of. 

After stepping back and thinking about the maintenance team that was going to need to service this connection quite often to change out the gasket, we thought we should look into a new plan.  We went back to the end user and design team and suggested we change from a clamped connection to a welded connection.  They agreed and thought this made for a better design anyway. It added a bit of work for our team, but we have saved the maintenance team hours of fighting with this connection when servicing the gasket.  

It’s important to see the bigger lean picture and think of the team that is going to come after you. Think of things like “How will a maintenance tech service this?” “Is there a way to make eliminate a future service need on this system?”

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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].