Summary of Gregory Howell lecture

Traditionally construction industry focused more on implementation of the contracts. The procedure
was to break up project into pieces and plan for it. Critical Path Method was one of the popular method
but over the period people started to complain as CPM controls time but, not cost as to complete in
time resources are increased. Productivity improvement was the next action. Howell and Glen looked
into foremen weekly plan and found out the success rate, it turned out to be 54% and this was observed
all over the world. They move on to describing the development of Toyota way or Pull Planning, he
describes engineer Ohnos observation of inventory being a waste. They figure out that why sometimes
while increasing the productivity of a crew the project was going worse. This is because the work has
been messed up. In order to improve the productivity, the productivity of the work flow must be
improved. The general barriers to delay were illustrated with example as the change in the design,
material being shipped late etc. these works could be sorted if there was enough communication
between workers and the management team. An example illustrated were the MRI had to installed and
there was no way the team could have done it in that time frame but the MRI Company had an incentive
in completing the work in time so they have done partially, shows that unexpected things could have
turn up if things are more informed. In the Last planner system is the person executing the work plans
out giving an informed plan and shows the interdependencies of the crew.
In lean construction we are optimizing the project not each piece of work. The speaker talks about the
phases of work which starts with a Request and forms a commitment which when performed, can be
declared and then declare satisfaction. To improve project performance there must be impeccable
coordination as discussed earlier and production system design should be done for optimum project
benefits not task wise and lastly collective enterprise and this has to be done with everyone and
planning this way will help try to make better decisions to reduce the time, cost and complexity.
Another important point to note is to eliminate contingencies but at the same time there presence gives
more safety hence there is a tradeoff.
The next topic was about contracts, the first LCI meeting agreed that present contracts do not obstruct
Lean construction nor do they support. Relational contracting was discussed. In traditional practice the
persons who know why, what and how are separated but modifying we bring people together in an
integrated team with core and the peripheral group. This would increase the scope for optimization and
participants are better informed about the project. It is observed that the project become more safer
after implementation. There should more thought in where to apply this method as people have invest
their time in it. Target value design is a method which gives a challenge to the design team to work out
innovative ways to meet the target. Integrated Project delivery system was discussed with an overview
template. Concluding it with by saying that fundamental practices, conceptual foundation and having a
common language are very important and leading edge would be target value design and choosing by
advantage. Lean construction is now being applied at various places in the world and concluded it by an
example of block building contract in Nigeria which was very successful. Wrapping up with
differentiating features of lean construction and tradition methods