Short Course: Stronger Teamwork and Project Delivery Through Lean Design

As designers and contractors face increasing pressure to deliver quality products within condensed project schedules, new ways of executing work and approaching collaboration have become critical to building successful teams. The goal of this presentation is to introduce Lean project delivery tools and share how they’ve been successfully implemented on a variety of projects at different scales and different stages of the design and construction process.

Lean project delivery directly engages all members of a project team: Clients, Stakeholders, Consultants, and Contractors alike. Lean project delivery also engages project team members across different levels of involvement, from project managers to supporting engineers. The Lean approach supports the strengthening of both external and internal team culture, as the project staff is learning more and developing quicker because the collaborative workflow demonstrates how their commitments support and work towards the overall project goals. Project deliverables are better coordinated and are less likely to require last minute schedule changes because each discipline understands what other team members are expecting and when. It also helps protect against margin erosion and scope creep because collaborative work plan development minimizes rework and increases productivity. Lastly, and arguably most importantly, Lean project delivery supports alignment with client expectations because it emphasizes the collaborative development of a weekly work plan where the integrated project team tracks their progress together.

All project teams, large and small, aim to meet client needs and expectations while trying to minimize production time and rework. The presenting team has adapted Lean project delivery tools and principles to meet the needs and scale of dozens of different projects and multiple clients over the last 15 years and have seen tangible benefits for project teams and agencies they’ve worked with, including better communication and teamwork across different engineering disciplines, subconsultants, and stakeholders and improvements to scope control and schedule management.

At its heart, Lean project delivery focuses on minimizing waste and maximizing value through collaborative project team engagement and building alignment across all project team members and stakeholders. Lean project delivery tools primarily focus on three areas: Collaborative Work Planning, Decision Making, and Continuous Improvement. This presentation will primarily focus on Collaborative Work Planning (Pull Planning, Weekly Work Planning, and other supporting tools that can be applied depending on a project’s needs) but will also introduce the Lean design tools of Conditions of Satisfaction, A3 Decision Making, Choosing-By-Advantages, Target Value Design, Plus | Delta, and Keep | Stop | Start retrospective.

The presentation will consist of a presentation of the aforementioned Lean tools and an interactive exercise in pull planning, where a few volunteers will participate in an exercise facilitated by the presentation team and show the audience the types of proactive conversations implementing a Lean approach to project delivery enacts. During this exercise, audience questions will also be answered.