Last Planner System Overview

The Last Planner System is the codification of the practices used by the best project teams.

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D. Brown Management
August 30, 2018 3 minute read
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The Last Planner System (LPS) was designed by the Lean Construction Institute.

Field Productivity: Last Planner System Overview.

They have turned this into a trainable and scalable system that can help contractors mitigate the talent shortage.  

As Greg Howell explains the system’s roots started with analysis of weekly work plans (Short Interval Plans - SIPs) discovering that on average only 54% of planned tasks got completed. 

 

A system like LPS works best if it can be used by the whole project team driven by the project owner in some form of integrated delivery.  

Most elements can very effectively be used by individual specialty contractors.  Jason Mayes does a great job in the videos below outlining the key elements once the master project plan with milestones is in place:  

  • Pull-Planning:  For each major phase.  Obviously better if you can do this with all other trades but even within a single specialty contractor’s project team this will facilitate learning.  
  • 6 Week Look Ahead:  Making sure all bottlenecks are removed.  https://dbmgt.co/2LCBPmX
  • Weekly Work Plan:  Get specific and keep it on-track with ABC Daily Planning
  • Percent Planned Complete (PPC):  Great measure of predictable delivery and the basis for a learning tool.  Most of the time it is one of the 6 Pillars of Productivity being missed that caused the task to not be completed. 

Remember that the speed of actual installation is not the biggest problem with project productivity. LPS addresses many of the major problems.  

How can you apply this to your project planning and delivery process? 

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