Last Planner System and P6 Scheduling in Construction

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  • #1050
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    Do any members utilize the Last Planner System at their organizations? We have jumped into the Lean Construction movement a couple of years ago, and one of the backbones of LC is the Last Planner System. The foundation of LPS is to involve the persons closest to the work to be heavily invested in schedule development. This is a good thing. So, the project superintendent, his team, subcontractors, designers/engineers/architects, etc., would participate in schedule development through pull planning. Pull planning is defined as taking each project milestone from the overall project schedule and schedule in reverse to ascertain when work to achieve a milestone must start, identify obstacles, seqeunce of work, durations and relationships between tasks. Sounds great, right? You really want those involved in the work to assist in schedule development. This part of LPS is great. Practitioners of LPS are encouraged to schedule their work at what I call the task level, as in Level 5 tasks. As each work package or scope approaches, tasks are placed on wall-mounted planning boards that are actually a six-week lookahead schedule. Each morning, the task “owner” (persons responsible for the work) note if they did (or did not) the assigned work for the previous day. Reasons for not achieving the daily work goals are tabulated and published according to a standardized list of reasons for not completing work. The problem with LPS is that some organizations are developing P6 schedules only at Level 2 or so level of detail. After two years of experimenting with high-level P6 schedules, we have found that we were losing the “Big Picture” overall view of how we were doing with regard to project completion. We were having to add more and more intermittent schedule milestones in P6 and losing a document that actually contained useful information. You had information at the task level on the planning boards at a jobsite, and high-level milestone tracking in P6, but no useful reporting in between these two tools. I was persuaded to only have milestones in P6 schedules with no tasks. Our managers saw no need to have tasks in P6 any longer. Then, when work was resequenced in the field on the planning boards, it became a nightmare to simulate the same in P6 because the planning boards only looked six weeks in to the future. Also, it’s pretty hard to copy a 30 inch by 60 inch markerboard to report out to the offsite stakeholders. I also had one or two managers who thought we can essentially not use P6 at all.

    Finally some light at the end of the tunnel. We have decided that P6 needs actual activities in the schedule, the planning boards have somewhat been retained, and P6 will actually be used to plan and report schedule execution. After two years of anxiety, I was able to enlist a schedule-savvy superintendent to team up with me to get our processes changed. Happy days are here again!

    Does anyone else have any experience with the Last Planner System and what level of detail to have in P6?

    Sorry, I didn’t intend to write a novel!

    Regards,
    Michael Thibodaux
    New Orleans, LA
    mthibodaux@broadmoorllc.com

    #2792
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    I thought gas prices were dropping? The last thing I bought was The Fantastic Four extended edition, X-2: X-Men United, and the soundtrack for The Queen.

    #2801
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    The NBN guy came this afternoon and tested my end, which was fine and then discovered the fibre in the street was faulty. Well, another NBN guy had already concluded that two weeks ago, when he came out for a neighbour connected to the same box in the street. What a comedy. So when is it going to get fixed?

    #2820
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    I used to be really into Tool, but that was awhile ago. Im still not sure if Im going to pick up the album or not. I havent heard it yet, but a friend of mine showed me the packaging the other day. Its great, but does the music match the strength of how its packaged?

    #2851
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    Same thing happened to me. Played my two week trial, had a blast, went to re-up for a few months and received nothing but an error. My only recourse was to buy time cards using the same credit card. WTF is up with that?

    #2880
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    All I have to add is that too many “managers or superintendents” are concerned in getting the job done and not wanting to see the detail work outlined in getting the job done. The devil is in the detail and if you don’t break down the work to a level of what needs to be done before the next thing is started , and incorporating a method of recording progress, you will never know where you are or when something may be complete.
    As you k know, this is the bases of a work breakdown structure.

    The Managers/Supers just don’t want to plan, it takes too much time and effort, and they need to get back to work.

    P.S. What is with the previous responses?

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