Planning - Integrating the 4 Key Responsibilities

There are four major responsibilities the foreman has that often seem to be competing with each other.

D. Brown Management Profile Picture
Share

Effective planning combined with regular feedback (at least weekly) combined with a structured look at how to improve each week is the key to integrating these four key responsibilities of a Foreman

Field Productivity: Planning, Integrating the four key responsibilites. Safety, Production, Customer Satisfaction, and Quality.

Greg Howell and Glen Ballard founded the Lean Construction Institute (LCI) based on analysis of construction projects showing that on average only 54% of the tasks planned for a week by the Foreman actually got completed. 

They developed The Last Planner System (LPS) that focuses on helping the Foreman plan then execute more effectively.  

The system includes a structured weekly learning element for the project team where they look back at what they accomplished measuring their Percent Plan Complete (PPC) and doing some rapid Root Cause Analysis to improve the process for the following week.  

PPC is a simple measurement - the quantity of tasks that were completed during the week compared to those that were planned.  This is described well in this whitepaper from LCI.

These tools are best used for a whole project team but can be effectively used by a single contractor on a project.  


Labor Productivity
Field labor is the often the biggest variable on a construction project - making it the biggest risk and opportunity....

Related Training
Labor Productivity
Field labor is the often the biggest variable on a construction project - making it the biggest risk and opportunity....

Percent Planned Complete (PPC) - Calculation Example
Yoda would be the perfect coach for managing schedules on projects: “Do or do not. There is no try.” This is the heart of Percent Planned Complete (PPC) and the weekly cycle of continuous production improvement.
Simple Math of Labor Savings
What would it be worth for your company to improve your field productivity? There is an incredible amount of low-hanging fruit to be picked when it comes to improving labor productivity.
Underlying Causes of Changes on Projects
Start improving your change management skills by creating some categories of the underlying causes of changes your company experiences.