Process Improvement

Introduction

The purpose of this project is to analyze project controls in light of the Last Planner System. We were fortunate to interview Barnes Construction on a recent project in which they began implementing the Last Planner System.

Project Description

Barnes Construction is completing construction of a Marriot Hotel in Downtown Oakland. The project was originally bid at $16 million and was taken over as a Design/Build (D/B) contract by Barnes when the design was approximately 50-60 percent complete. The project began in May 2000 and the current completion date is October 26, 2001.

The hotel is comprised of 5 floors and 162 guestrooms. The first floor includes a restaurant, lounge, lobby, kitchen and three meeting rooms. There is a garden, courtyard and pool. Challenges in this project include a drive through to rear parking lot and a mixture of wood framing, post tension concrete, metal frame with plaster, all entailing a lot of connections and materials. An unforeseen condition, 60-70% of the material hauled off was identified as hazardous and required special industrial handling. Additionally, the building of this D/B project took place between two years of Marriot specifications.

System Description

This section will follow a narrative as the contractual relations and controls changed through the course of the project.

To begin with, as mentioned in the Project Description, Barnes came on board and bid the job as D/B when the drawings were only 50-60% complete. Barnes assumed all design responsibility over the Architect at this point. However, the Owner had already established a relationship with the Architect prior to the new contractual relationship. Needless to say, the Architect, Owner and Barnes' organization adjusted to the new relations. The Barnes team now leading the project with their internal players as follows:

• Owner Coordinator – Vice President

• Project Integrator - Contracts

• Superintendent

• Controls Manager

• Technical Engineer

The Controls Manager came on board about 4 months into the project with the lead responsibility to implement the Last Planner System with the impression that the system was already in place. However, this was not the case. There were no Weekly Work Plans and sometimes there were weekly meetings. The Owner Coordinator highly supports the implementation, however the Integrator and the Superintendent on this particular project are more from "old school".

The first step of implementing the Last Planner System was to generate Weekly Work Plans with the subcontractors (See Appendix B). The first meetings took up to 4 hours per week and field foremen attended only, although their project managers (higher ups) were required contractually to participate. However, the foremen knew their manpower and whether materials were on site with some reliability. It took about 2 to 3 months to fine tune the weekly meetings to include looking at what happened last week and develop what can be done the next week. There was minimal attention to why things didn't get done and the meetings often failed to identify constraints or workable backlog. This lack of attention was done in effort to keep fights to a minimum. It was felt that the trade guys did not want to get hung up in the root causes, nor were they clear what the root causes were. Basically weekly work assignments were developed by what the subs felt made sense. This done in tandem with the Project Controller converting "what made sense" into a formal Weekly Work Plan.

Eventually a second Weekly Work Plan was generated each week for just Barnes (See Appendix C), in addition to the subcontractor's weekly work plan. Finally, Barnes implemented in-house daily staff meetings to exclusively track Barnes' progress against their own Weekly Work Plan in effort to more effectively manage accountability in house.

Phase Planning meetings were considered more successful in that the right players attended, i.e. including project managers familiar, trained in and supportive of Last Planner. The post-it approach was used and input on the spot into the computer during the meeting. These phase schedules became the basis for the Working Schedule. The Working Schedule was updated every few days after walking the jobsite to track what actually happened. Eventually this schedule was updated every week or two as to what actually happened. (See Appendix