2018Case18Exyte

65 L EAN C ONSTRUCTION I RELAND A NNUAL B OOK OF C ASES 2018 interim/completion milestones. The key to successfully managing multiple work-fronts and ensuring a robust sequence is not only developed but also delivered, is to ensure the Plan Do Check Act (PDCA) cycle is carried out continuously. LPS allows each and every member of the delivery team to contribute issues, concerns, and opportunities in an open forum, and likewise when activities are missed then the forum is collectively responsible for resequencing the particular activity or series of activities that have been missed. There is a focus on daily LPS boards and how the activities are segregated by discipline or subcontractor across a 4-Week and 6-Week timescale. This is a result of a detailed Pull session for a single phase of works which involves parallel work-fronts being worked on. This timescale should be reduced depending upon the complexity and size of scope as the PDCA cycle teaches us that the more complex the work-front the further one needs to break down that piece of scope and carry out the PDCA cycle more frequently. Sometimes the effectiveness of PDCA sessions can be limited to the skillset of the audience, and, therefore, it is of high importance that team members from all stakeholders make an effort to share the information that will feed into the review workshops. Dependent upon the size of project and level of detail required by the PM team on a project, the daily management of hits/misses and overall progress capture on a weekly basis can become challenging. Therefore, Exyte introduced to its LPS funct ion a dedicated sof tware plat form named “vPlanner®” which allows the LPS team to ensure accurate administration of the daily and weekly activities. It also allows the management team to have a historic log on the project decisions that had a particular impact on the project milestones or its ability to complete on time and within budget. The vPlanner® also allows critical path activities to be monitored with renewed focus as all predecessor activities are highlighted red until either mitigated or re-sequenced. In the past, project delivery teams have been focused on the Main Critical Path and the challenges of managing the sequence of activities which are equally critical has been left to the individual who is tasked with planning the sequence using a tool like Primavera. But vPlanner® will instantly highlight multiple paths which have a negative variance assigned to an individual activity and its entire float path to completion using the early/late start and finish free float calculations. The project data is gathered and a series of weekly and monthly variance reports issued to the entire Project Management team. The reports ultimately capture the number of commitments the team successfully achieved versus the number they had planned to achieve. Following on from this, a senior LPS expert will sit with the package owner and project planner to feed the information back into the overall programme of work to completion forecast. Figure 2. Collaborative Pull Planning Sessions. Primavera P6®, Last Planner® System Team, Project Stakeholders, and vPlanner® Exyte utilise current market-leading project management software packages such as Primavera P6.V8.2® and vPlanner® to allow accurate and timely management of project scope sequencing and mitigation of delays/impacts. These software solutions are combined with the crucial human interactions occurring across numerous integrated scope development workshops and constraint identification sessions held in the early stages of the project. The information from the workshops is captured and assessed by the project controls team and the information is fed back into the master schedule. Variance reporting is a vital output from the LPS team to provide confidence that the project team is not only performing with a good success rate against its own deliverables, but to ensure that the small percentage of failures do not become consistent from a particular discipline or stakeholder. No one tool or technique provides a catchall solution for focused sequencing and measuring the success rate of the planned activities. The combination of detailed analysis of schedule performance whilst measuring daily and weekly work patterns and requirements for mitigation allows for greater confidence within the team to make a collective mitigation plan. Consensus decision-making is what makes LPS the chosen practice for all Exyte projects where a focus on integrated project delivery (IPD) is high on the agenda. Ongoing training and coaching is an absolute necessity to allow the open forum to remain focused on the project objectives, and the Lean experts Exyte has on site actively encourage and facilitate the team to open up, be honest, and, perhaps most impor tant of al l , provide encouragement to one another. LPS is not a system that can be delivered by a single person using cleaver analysis software tools. Instead, it is the direct opposite. The fol lowing funct ions are al l based around human interaction and are vital to the LPS approach to Lean project delivery: • Invite the people who will be the last planners to each Pull session and encourage ownership of scope. • Share and agree the responsibilities for the milestone with all the last planners (owners). • Brief the entire delivery team on all the work going on in the phase. • Have each last planner study their scope of work and remain focused on the 6-week look-ahead. • 6-week & 8-week Look Ahead Schedule – on a weekly basis the contractor will engage in the collaborative planning sessions, which in turn will develop the 6-to-8- week look aheads. • Work Force Report – the contractor will record the work force requirements as part of the collaborative planning session which will include the following information: o Contractor’s scheduled versus actual manpower by type and total. o Contractor’s administrative headcount. o Major equipment being utilised. o Other pertinent remarks, manpower shortages, visitors, material received, and the like. • Weekly Quantity/Progress Report – on a daily basis the subcontractor will record on the weekly look ahead whiteboard the activities that were completed the previous day. The project manager will verify that these were complete. The cumulative activities complete will form the basis of the PPC (Planned Percent Complete) for the week. The purpose of this exercise is not to micro-manage the scope but rather provide reassurance that every team and discipline involved with the delivery of scope is aware of the individual responsibility and more importantly the constraints of working in a multi- disciplinary environment.