Real Life Lean 046

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 - Get Communication Flowing and Keep Your Jobsite Going

• Lean Podcast - Character Development with Mack Story

• Lean Event - Writing Effective RFPs for Lean Projects

• Real Life Lean - Daily Huddles

Lean Article

Communication is key to success on a construction project. When all parties know who is doing what, where they are doing it and when they will be done is key for establishing flow and finding success. But why do so many projects lack flow and find themselves stuck in a firefighting mentality day in an day out that uses the superintendent as the bottleneck to their productivity? I’d argue it is because that is the way it has always been done and the right tools and practice are not being implemented. In the article below, the authors share some ideas on ways to get out of this “No Flow Cycle” and find flow for your trades.

Takeaway - One tool that I liked best from this article was the Single Motion Exchange of Trades which is used to identify and coordinate handoffs. By focusing on hand offs, and what the next person/team needs, we can start to understand what will make a project flow and work to provide what’s necessary to do so.

Lean Podcast

Hoot’s On The Ground is back this week with another great podcast. This weeks episode features Mack Story, owner of Blue Collar Leadership. In this episode Mack dives into who he is and how he started on his lean journey. He shares stories and experiences from teaching lean manufacturing techniques to people nation wide. Mack currently is a leadership speaker who travels the country sharing his story and inspiring change in the blue collar work force.

Takeaway - As the title of this episode hints at, character development is a huge part of this episode. Mack talks about how his character has changed over the years and shares mindsets that he uses to make these changes. I had the pleasure of hearing Mack speak at the LCI Congress event in October of last year and he did not disappoint.

Lean Event

Fail to plan and you’re planning to fail, right? Can you think of a better time to plan and structure a lean project than the Request For Proposal (RFP)? Do you think you’d find better lean partners if you wrote a more effective RFP that detailed the lean tools, practices and mindsets that would be used on your project? In the webinar below from LCI, John Zachara will share his experience submitting lean RFPs and will use real examples to help you better write or respond to lean RFPs.

Real Life Lean - Lean practices in the real world

My project team likes daily huddles. 

We have a stand up foreman’s huddle at 7AM each morning and it’s often been referred to as “the best meeting of the week”. Our project spans over 3 floors in 3 different buildings on a 60 acre campus. We have a major need for coordination.  

After our 7AM foreman huddle, our project leads have a coordination huddle. This includes the owner, design team, construction team, commissioning and qualification team, the automation team and many other owner group teams.  

Even with these two meetings we found we were missing something.  We were missing a key huddle that coordinated the hand offs from group to group with the people executing the work.  In the first huddle we have our construction teams coordinating. In the second, we have the leaders from each team talking about what they’re doing and what they need, but not coordinating it. We needed another check in for for handing off the different phases of work and prioritizing them teams working on these hand offs. 

Enter - the daily prioritization huddle.  This is now referred to as the 2nd best meeting of the day (the construction huddle often has donuts, tough to beat that).  In this prioritization meeting we are coordinating the hand offs between construction teams and owner functional groups based on priority’s set by leadership. This meeting just started this week and has proved to be extremely effective. A couple things we did to ensure we’d find success:

• Keep is short and focused.  No one wants another long meeting. This one is 15 minutes 

• Have a structure and be prepared. For us, we talk about our daily priorities and add some stretch goals to these if we finish our priority 1 goals early. We have the right people in the room to make sure we can have full coordination on each system. 

• Be flexible. Use a plus/delta to adjust the meeting for what your team needs! 

  

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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].