Learning to See Simplicity within a Complex Project Through the Lens of Pull Planning

Production Planning and Control 751

LEARNING TO SEE SIMPLICITY WITHIN A COMPLEX PROJECT THROUGH THE LENS OF

PULL PLANNING Cynthia C.Y. Tsao1 and Glenn J. Hammons2

ABSTRACT Ideally, project teams should get feedback from foremen from key trades to help guide work structuring decisions early in the design process. Doing so enables project teams to reveal the constructability implications intrinsic to different design options. Then, project owners may make product design decisions that would better support the construction process and thus improve the likelihood of meeting their project goals. Unfortunately, if trade foremen missed the opportunity to influence a project’s product design at project inception, the project team may later face daunting challenges to construct project components that appear complex at first glance. This paper describes such a scenario in the building out of an atrium for a $220 million new hospital addition in the U.S. It explores how the project team used pull planning to reveal production lines that needed to be created to build out the hospital’s five-story atrium. It explains how the project team considered various work structuring scenarios and eventually settled on the final work sequence. Thus, this case study will demonstrate how the project team was able to learn how to see simpler process approaches to constructing what initially appeared to be a complex product design.

KEYWORDS Work structuring, sequencing, product-process design integration, pull planning, process standardization

INTRODUCTION Previous case studies have demonstrated the value of using location-based planning (e.g., Seppänen et al. 2010) and modularity to build out identical and similar building units in the housing (e.g., Lennartsson et al. 2008) and healthcare industries (e.g., Olsen and Ralston 2013). However, modularity combined with pull planning (that is, the collaborative planning process in which meeting attendees determine how work must be sequenced and handed off between different trades to achieve an end milestone) can also be used to assist with building out complex product designs that do not initially appear to contain identical or similar building units. This paper will outline such a case study in which the project team leveraged pull planning, work structuring, and a production system design approach to standardize the process for building out a five-story hospital atrium.

1 Owner, Navilean; Senior Associate, Lean Project Consulting; Adjunct Faculty, Wentworth Inst. of

Technology; Brookline, MA, 02445, USA, Phone +1 510/593-4884, research@navilean.com 2 Project Director, Skanska USA Building Inc., Nemours – AIDHC DE Expansion Project, 1610

Rockland Road, Wilmington, DE, USA, Phone +1 302/298-7663 Glenn.Hammons@skanska.com

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Learning to See Simplicity within a Complex Project Through the Lens of Pull Planning

Production Planning and Control 759

The atrium team was careful to copy over the productivity rates developed by trade project managers and foremen from the earlier pull plans into the new 3 m (10’) length standard pull plans. In a few instances, the new pull plans were more conservative in terms of the time estimate for completing work. Figure 15 shows the new pull plans captured on a single sheet of plotter paper with the 3 m (10’) of standard “Rail-work” on top and the 3 m (10’) of standard “E-work” on the bottom.

After developing the new pull plans, the atrium team met with the trade foremen to get their feedback and develop buy-in into the new pull plans (Miles 1998). At first, some foremen were concerned that these “new plans” deviated from the earlier plans that they developed in early December 2013 with their project managers. To allay their concerns, the atrium team moved the old pull plans into the conference room and walked the foremen slowly through the new pull plans so they could see that the new plans were either equal or more conservative in time estimate. It was only after the step-by-step walk-through between the old and new pull plans that the foremen became comfortable with the new pull plans and were willing to follow them.

DETERMINING WHERE TO START ATRIUM FACE WORK With standard work processes established for atrium face work, the atrium team now had to resolve: (1) how to determine where to start the work, (2) whether to have work move in a clockwise or counter-clockwise fashion, and (3) how atrium face work would interact with the other production lines. After the mid-December 2013 meeting with the trade foremen, the atrium team decided to hold off on terrazzo work until after the trades completed the bulk of atrium face work. This then de-coupled the atrium floor production line from the atrium face production line (Figure 10).

Next, the atrium team re-examined the atrium ceiling production line. At that time, the drywall foreman was planning on completing the northern half of the drywall soffits before moving on to the southern half. Once the soffits were installed, the other trades still needed to use the high 38 m (125 feet) lifts to complete two more elements of atrium ceiling work – painting and acoustical ceiling tile. The atrium team concluded that in order to switch from 38 m (125 feet) lifts to 23 m (75 feet) lifts sooner, painting and acoustical ceiling tile work should be broken up and managed in two phases – first, to complete the northern half of the atrium ceiling and then, to complete the southern half. This enabled the trades to overlap at least some of the atrium ceiling work. The atrium team would have preferred to break up the atrium ceiling work into three or more phases, but it was impossible to do so because there were only two lifts available in the atrium.

Now that the sequence for the last activities of atrium ceiling work has been established, the atrium team could then determine its impact on atrium face work. The northern half of the atrium face consists of work zones B2, B3, B4, and B5 (Figure 11). The southern half of the atrium face consists of work zones B1, B8, B7, and B6. The atrium team studied how atrium make-ready work had been progressing to that point (e.g., removing the plywood pockets from the concrete floors) and determined that it felt more natural and made more sense for atrium face work to proceed in a clockwise fashion as most workers were right-handed. As a result, the atrium team could finally establish where to start atrium face work – in work zone B2, and work would proceed in a clockwise fashion.

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Learning to See Simplicity within a Complex Project Through the Lens of Pull Planning

Production Planning and Control 761

flowing well, and the trades have only worked out of sequence on occasion as opposed to regularly. Thus, the atrium team found that their investment in planning has paid off since all trades are on the same page with regards to sequencing and the foremen are committed to the plan since they bought into it after participating in the pull planning sessions.

CONCLUSIONS The contractor’s experiment with the use of pull planning to organize build out of the atypical atrium space evolved over a period of four months. During that time, the contractor methodically considered various activity sequences and work flows to uncover hidden production lines. Along the path of this experimentation, the project team reached three primary conclusions:

• At first, the atrium design seemed like a “one of a kind” work of art to the project team, and there would be no ability to implement much of a flow other than the typical work breakdown by level or elevation. The atrium team’s pull planning efforts revealed that complex, artistic building spaces can be broken down into distinct production lines that provide better clarity, structure, and discipline to the construction process.

• Implementing pull planning in the later stages of a project can still generate value. Whereas an initial belief was that it was too late to use lean on atrium work, the final process in planning atrium work revealed that benefits can be derived even if implementation occurred in later project phases.

• Significant gains are achievable through the use of pull planning. The project team originally regarded the atrium as a distressed portion of the schedule, and it eventually became one of the most successful parts of the project.

In addition, the project team reached three other conclusions about pull planning:

• Changing the culture is difficult but achievable. During the pull planning sessions, the trade foremen could not resist the temptation to overstate their durations. Everyone wants to under promise and then overachieve. Then, since the attendees only started to unravel the details that would impact how work might be handed off between trades, the first pull planning session was inconclusive. When the trade foremen were faced with a lack of clear direction for atrium work, they became argumentative, obstinate, and defensive, and a few literally walked away from the meeting. It took several follow-up meetings until the trade foremen realized that the planning meetings would result in less supervisory effort, so their quality and production would actually increase if they maintained the required production rates to make work flow.

• In some cases, trade foremen do not really know enough about what they are doing to provide accurate information. When asked to assign times to their work in the pull planning sessions, some really did not seem to know, knew but could not express it, or did not want to divulge the information. “You have to ask the Project Manager” or “Ask my office” was a typical reply. Trade foremen need to be informed and empowered individuals to better support efforts in pull planning.

Cynthia C.Y. Tsao and Glenn J. Hammons

762 Proceedings IGLC-22, June 2014 | Oslo, Norway

• The concept of production system design for organizing workflow is actually foreign to many trade foremen. Boiling work down to one repetitive unit that can be monitored, adjusted, and improved upon to create higher efficiency in construction is not a prevalent way of thinking or acting.

By documenting this project team’s pull planning journey, we hope this case study will inspire other project teams to learn how to see the simplicity within complex project designs and take pull planning to yet another higher level of use.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors would like to thank Kay Holbrook of AIDHC and Mike Rayburn, Patrick Keenan, Chris Eagle, Nick Denardo, Anthony Colonna, Marty Corrado, Matt Pentz, Derek Counts, Carolyn Samuelian, Leigh Emberton, and the rest of the Skanska Nemours project staff for their involvement and assistance with the effort described in this paper. We would also like to thank the IGLC reviewers and our colleagues who provided valuable feedback to us on how to improve this case study.

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