INNOVATIVE PRACTICES

“We had 32 to 34 months [of schedule] and when we came out of the big room we were down to 18 months. but it was suggested that we could actually get it down to a year. So, we did the whole pull planning event in the big room. That's when I realized we have stumbled onto something pretty amazing.”

Dennis Cuku

Lean methods underpinned the ability for the Mosaic Centre to complete on budget and ahead of schedule

Target Value Design is a collaborative design process involving designers, builders, suppliers, estimators and owners co-located in one place to collaboratively produce a design that provides the best value for the Owner. Budget (the target value) is a design criterion. The team designs to the budget instead of the conventional process of estimating the cost of the design, and then re-designing to eliminate overruns.

The project team adopted the Last Planner® System which is a tool developed by the Lean Construction Institute to control the pull planning process and, therefore, production (Figure 4). Production control is necessary on projects to support working toward planned accomplishments, doing what can be done to move along a planned path, and when that becomes impossible, determine alternative paths that accomplish desired goals. Chandos communicated progress to the entire team through weekly reports, describing the lean “wins” and the resulting net progress gained. The architects believed that the pull planning process worked well in this collaborative project set-up.

The team developed “snake diagrams” to visually track milestones and to know whether they are above or below milestone in terms of time. In the developed system, red-light alarms would be triggered if people were two weeks or more behind schedule. The architect was responsible for maintaining the snake diagrams.

The team also followed Paul Akers’ “2 Second Lean” approach 18 , which teaches team members to continuously improve and eliminate waste in small increments each and every day. The goal is to “turn every team member into a world class problem solver who seeks and destroys waste every day”.