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
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