Collaboration or Competition? Share your opinion…

I want to offer to start using this space for businesses to share information and practices that could raise the standards for how we do business.  My intention is that through collaboration and sharing of knowledge we increase the chances of success.  What’s inspired me is as I have moved around the country in the last ten years I see pockets of success with certain parts of a business, and found that information to be valuable to other businesses.  That was the reason I founded a roundtable discussion and what has become a NARI chapter,  seven years ago – I found contractors very interested in what other GC’s where doing, and they didn’t have a way to easily discover that. 

There are a few challenges with this… One problem is getting the right information out fast enough to everyone that needs it in a way that could make it useful.  Another one is the idea many have about competition with others, making sharing what works for you seem like a really bad idea.  Another might be the fear and doubt people have about what really does work, what you can do and what you can’t – what works for one company may not work for another!  These are all valid concerns, and I intend to explore them one at a time and see what makes more sense – collaborate or compete?  Your thoughts and ideas are most welcome…

 

How do You Manage People?

I was in a meeting with a company last week when one of the project managers said he was having trouble with one of the lead carpenters he manages, and was wondering if it was wise to have that lead continue to run jobs.  The owner stepped in and said that - ”having that lead be succesful was the job the Project Manager was hired for.  “If he fails, you fail,  so you need to develop a commitment and methodology that makes that guy look good”.   This is an example of the kind of management that happens in a culture of accountability, its the opposite of the more traditional  command and control style that I write elsewhere about. 

Where do You Waste Time and Money?

For most of us, where we waste time is not immediately apparent.  Obviously if it were, we would correct it.  But in the same way that we have employee’s operating with institutionalized behaviour, so too is our view of our own inefficiencies justified, and often with something as innocent as “that’s the way we have always done it”.  Hence the saying, ” Organizations rise to their own level of incompetence”.   I frequently run across the the regular practice of calling a sub-contractor four to six times to show up for a work assignment.  Now multiply that with how many leads you have, managing how many subs, then add in PM’s coordinating with the leads, architects, and owners….get the picture?

Exploring Project Management

  When people ask me about the work I have been doing recently,  I tell them about the last 10 to 15 years or so, and then about meeting Greg Howell and his partner Hal Macomber 2 years ago.  I found them both to be very interesting, and our time together lead to finding that what we both have in common was a commitment to remove the suffering found in project management.  I didnt know at the time how serious Greg and Hal were about it, and I didnt know there was a world wide community sharing in these same concerns.   One of the next steps I would like to take is to organize a group of people from our local community to explore more deeply the practices of management, the problems, and new ideas and solutions.  I see this as an ongoing opportunity to learn, and connect ourselves to the larger international community for lean construction.  I recognize that some may think our practices at the level of residential may be too different from the larger commercial companies.  But it has been my experience that the kinds of problems they have sound very similar to the kinds of problems we have.  So I invite you to use this blog so we can begin to explore what’s working, and what is not working, and what we can do about it.   Tell me what it is that you would like to see as a priority for our focus, what breakdowns should we focus on first?   

Lean event with Greg Howell

Yesterdays event with Greg Howell went pretty well all things considered.  The technology was a bit challenging to say the least, but we were able to get a lot of information and very important points across to the group on the Last Planner System.  Greg did a great job of explaining the evolution and history that went into the making of the system. Some of the key points from memory: What Greg realized was needed was a planning system that allowed for tracking and matching of work flow and capacity, and the making and keeping of commitments to perform tasks. Greg explained how the system moves towards greater certainty from the master schedule, through the pull phase event, 6 week look ahead, to the weekly work plan. 

The system travels along a path of what should happen, to what can happen, to what will happen, and what did happen. Greg made a very good point about how effective collaboration at the pull event phase can reveal otherwise hidden conditions and or opportunities to make requests of other trades allowing the project to be completed weeks earlier.

 We talked about how foundational accountability is to planning, and how it arises in our speaking.  There is no heavenly endowed accountability outside our own speaking, that accountability arises in the moment of your speaking a commitment. This is a fundamental shift in moving from a task orientation with a background assumption that people already are accountable, no matter if they say so or not, to a new focus on whats being spoken between two performers. Were putting people, conversations for planning, and the commitments being spoken at the center and foreground of whats happening in the production process.  This practice builds accountability on all levels of your projects, as well as your organization.  All in all it was a pretty good event, and well do it again possibly in September.