A Northern California builder seeks to improve their lean chops

Background

Owners in the Northern California market challenged the builder to improve their lean chops. We provided coaching to existing projects, aided in project pursuits, and offered enterprise level coaching.

Obstacle

Two opportunities came from the owner: a bed tower addition at an existing campus and a Medical Office Building at a different campus. The RFP required lean tools and methods so we needed to develop strategies to help the teams quickly get up to speed with lean.

Approach

Our goal from the beginning was to build lean capacity within the interview (and future project) teams, moving beyond our consulting expertise and instead focusing on helping the team gain mastery of new lean skills. We adopted a Training Within Industry (TWI) approach by first offering basic concepts and then helping people gain deeper knowledge as they learned by doing.

The Bed Tower RFP asked the team to make recommendations for sizing and site placement of a parking garage so we coached a Choosing By Advantages (CBA) decision study.

• Took 10 minutes to outline basic concepts of CBA and then began a study to size the parking garage.
• Invited the Senior Superintendent to facilitate the CBA for site placement.
• Helped the Estimator to align conceptual pricing with the CBA
• Prepped the Senior Superintendent to present the CBA method and report on the results in the interview.

We worked with the Director of Preconstruction during the pursuit of the Medical Office Building

• We developed a detailed project plan for Last Planner System
• We prepared an approach to drive Target Value Delivery
• We wrote a number of sections of the proposal and helped the team prepare for the interview
• We participated in the interview as a lean coach to the project team

Result

Through our engagement, we helped the team to win the Medical Office Building project and then rolled into coaching the project team as work began in design and preconstruction.

Lessons Learned

Adult learning is different than what we did when we were in school as kids.

Just start and then build. The story of the parking CBAs is a great example of learning on the job. Normally, CBA training takes 1-3 days to complete. The approach we took not only got folks practicing the skill immediately but also accomplished work that advanced the proposal process

Recommendation: Start with enough and then improve, improve, improve.

True lean happens every day. In the long term, a person who learns to think in lean terms will exceed the person who learns lean tools because they immediately start applying what they know to the world around them. Once they learn to see, they will never run out of opportunities to make improvements

Recommendation: Build a mindset of lean through learning to see waste.