2020Case12Jacobs

Contents Lean Construction Ireland Annual Book of Cases 2020 48 Ca e 12 • Rather than ignoring constraints – issues that have the po- tential to prevent work progressing to plan – LPS encourages proactive identification of, ownership for, and removal of constraints. Constraint logs are often employed to support this aspect of LPS deployment. • Learning and Improvement – the simple process of cap- turing and categorising the main root causes for failed com- mitments that is embedded into LPS encourages teams to move beyond blame-oriented behaviours (“who”) towards learning and improvement (“why”). • Shared Understanding of Flow and Pull – the closer col- laboration that LPS deployment encourages creates a better understanding of the importance of the Lean principles of flow and pull for all parties. These Lean concepts become less abstract, and it becomes more evident to all that having one discipline or trade getting significantly ahead of others can create queues and waiting waste elsewhere. LPS has become an increasingly prevalent Lean practice within Jacobs’ Life Sciences projects worldwide. There is growing recognition within Jacobs and among our client base that LPS deployment yields significant benefits during design and construction phases. On a recent life sciences project, the Jacobs construction management team, together with all key contractors on-site, successfully implemented some of the core principles underlying LPS in a manner that was working well and yielding benefits prior to the emergence of Covid-19. The challenge for the project team was to successfully migrate some of the LPS practices on the project to remote working, without diluting any of its key benefits, following the adoption of social distancing measures and new working practices necessitated by Covid-19. Adapting Last Planner® System Implementation to Covid-19 Challenges and Remote Working • Digital Weekly Planning & Lookahead Meetings – A key element of LPS implementation is the weekly planning and lookahead meeting. Pre-Covid-19, this meeting was a tradi- tional face-to-face meeting attended by the Jacobs construc- tion team and representatives from all project contractors engaged on-site. The meeting has since migrated to a virtual meeting format using Microsoft Teams to ensure compli- ance with social distancing measures. Weekly results and production plans are now generated via Teams to enable the weekly PPC% to be generated and shared virtually in real-time during the Teams meeting. Team commitments are discussed, made, and captured virtually via shared screens during the meeting. The weekly and updated lookahead plans are issued from Teams shortly after the meeting is con- cluded. Root causes of failed commitments are also catego- rised and issued as part of the output of the virtual meeting. are also categorised and issued as part of the output of the virtual meeting. • Digital Pull Planning Meetings – Jacobs has also begun to host virtual pull planning meetings as part of the migration to digital LPS deployment. Previously, pull planning meet- ings were held in a traditional format with all team mem- bers attending in a meeting room using Post-its to identify upcoming milestones and the various tasks required to meet them on time. Jacobs is now employing a number of digital tools to support virtual pull planning meetings, including Nureva and Mural, with good levels of success. • Lessons from Digital LPS – The changes to the LPS practices outlined above have been successfully implemented in the context of the wider changes on sites and in working practices necessitated by Covid-19. The migration of these LPS practices to remote working has been achieved without significantly affecting performance levels, as reflected by the PPC% trend in Figure 2. Figure 1. Example of Virtual Pull Planning Figure 2. PPC Trends