Unintended Consequences of Chasing Craft Productivity

The global engineering and construction industry is obsessed with worker productivity (both knowledge and craft workers) driven by the belief that there is a direct relationship to project performance results.

Want A Better Culture? Focus on Creating Happiness

Happiness isn't just a buzzword when it comes to team engagement and employee retention. True happiness is a state of emotional well-being that goes beyond superficial benefits.

Rising Terrain Daily Huddle Guide

The Daily Huddle is a fundamental coordination practice that keeps people alerted to the current state of planned work and how that work may have been influenced by unplanned events. For project teams implementing the Last Planner System® the Daily Huddle serves as an initial step to learning to plan work more reliably.

High-Performance Leadership #5 - Facilitation Strategies and Tools to Transform Your Meetings

When one develops a standard process agenda such as this, team members quickly adopt a new rhythm, and it is easy to tweak the process steps or timing as needed to match the individual meeting.

Are Schedules and Project Production Systems the Same?

About a hundred years have passed since the construction industry started exploring the use of Gantt-type charts, copying what manufacturing was doing then. To date, the construction industry has expanded the use of Gantt-type charts (schedules) and established them as must-haves for projects.

What is the Lean Construction Pyramid? And how can you use it to simplify your understanding and Lean implementation?

The field of lean design and construction has been around for more than 30 years. Over time our goal is to make lean design and construction simpler, not more complex.

The Common Origins of Lean Construction, Advanced Work Packaging and Project Production Institute

Several institutions have formed over the past 30 years aimed at improving the performance of the construction industry. Among those institutions are the Construction Industry Institute (CII), the Lean Construction Institute (LCI) and the Project Production Institute (PPI.

High-Performance Leadership #4 - Facilitation Strategies and Tools to Transform Your Meetings

Just as every problem people identify about meetings is rooted in a lack of skill in leading human interactions, then at a higher level, every problem that drives our projects off course is driven by process blindness and skill deficits in project production.

Organizations of the Future

Organizations see themselves as legal entities whose influence is limited by the constitution of the organization and the offers (services/products) they provide. Their survival depends heavily on being efficient (perfecting their offers) and on efforts to control the future, so they can beat the competition.

Your Secret Recipe for Lean Success

I want to share with you about Japan's five important pivots. For those of you who have been to Japan with me, you’ve heard me articulate-this story before, but I never fully developed a deep understanding of what really transpired until now.