BUS605: Strategic Project Management

Now that you are familiar with CPM, the geometric order response to the demands of scheduling, let's focus on the living order approach, pull scheduling. A pull schedule is by its very nature a work in progress. Creating it is a collaborative process, and it must be updated regularly in response to current conditions. As you saw in Lesson 6, an initial pull schedule is often created during a structured collaborative session with key project members using color-coded Post-it notes that can be removed or repositioned as necessary. The orange notes in Figure 7-1 represent deliverables; the yellow notes represent steps required to produce the deliverables. After all stakeholders agree, a schedule like this is typically translated into a digital format, such as Microsoft Project or Microsoft Excel.

Figure 7-1. Pull schedules are often created with Post-it Notes on a white board

In a pull schedule, it is essential to define the project's deliverables and handoffs, which, cumulatively, add up to the project's outcome. That's why color-coded Post-it notes are so useful; they allow you to see all the project's deliverables at a glance. A pull schedule also makes it easy to see the steps required to produce a deliverable, and to identify when the handoff to the next phase of the project occurs. As in a relay race, where runners pass the baton from one to the other, the handoffs are crucial to a project's success. If a runner drops the baton, it often doesn't matter how quickly she ran her leg of the race, because the other runners will never be able to make up for the time lost in retrieving the dropped baton. The same is true in living order project management, in which the flow of work from one phase to the next is of paramount concern, and in which successful handoffs between phases can mean the difference between a project that fails or succeeds.

Creating a Pull Schedule

You can create a pull schedule electronically, using any number of scheduling programs. But to encourage the kind of collaborative conversations that encourage all stakeholders to become pull thinkers, it's helpful to start by gathering all stakeholders in a room with a large white board (or an entire wall) set aside to use as the schedule work area. Working backwards from a target completion date, stakeholders place color-coded Post-it notes on the schedule to indicate when they will complete various tasks. No participant is allowed to move another participant's Post-it note. Instead, as scheduling conflicts become apparent, stakeholders need to negotiate with each other, repositioning Post-it notes only after stakeholders agree on a solution to each scheduling problem.

Because the people creating the schedule are the actual people responsible for the various activities, the process inevitably focuses on activities that are dependent on other activities. For example, passage of a key internal user test for new software would need to precede release of the software to an expanded beta test group. The end result of this kind of planning is a schedule with far greater team buy-in than can be produced with CPM alone.

The step-by-step process of creating a pull schedule is hard to grasp in the abstract. To really learn how it works, you have to do it. But you can get a better sense of the steps involved in pull scheduling by watching these videos:

• A quick three-minute introduction to pull planning schedules in construction: "Pull Planning: Miron Construction Co".
  

• A more in-depth, 30-minute discussion: "Pull Planning: Lean Construction".
  
  
• Although essentially an ad for a company that sells supplies related to pull planning, this one-minute video shows one way to organize a room for pull scheduling: Pull Planning Kit: Big Room Supplies.

Varieties of Pull Scheduling

Pull scheduling, in the form of the Last Planner System (LPS) is essential to Lean. The goal of the LPS is "to produce predictable work flow and rapid learning in programming, design, construction, and commissioning of projects".

The five main elements of the LPS include:

• Master Scheduling (setting milestones and strategy; identification of long lead items);
• Phase "Pull" planning (specify handoffs; identify operational conflicts);
• Make Work Ready Planning (look ahead planning to ensure that work is made ready for installation; re-planning as necessary);
• Weekly Work Planning (commitments to perform work in a certain manner and a certain sequence); and
• Learning (measuring percent of plan complete (PPC), deep dive into reasons for failure, developing and implementing lessons learned). (Lean Construction Institute)

Note that these elements are similar to Agile scrum, which is not surprising given that the LPS and Agile both emerged from Lean. Also, these five elements of LPS tie back to the concept of rolling wave planning, described in Lesson 6.

Schedules in the LPS focus on the last responsible moment, which is the "instant in which the cost of the delay of a decision surpasses the benefit of delay; or the moment when failing to make a decision eliminates an important alternative" (Lean Construction Institute). The last responsible moment is similar to choosing when to make an airline reservation. You want to wait long enough to know enough details to avoid costly changes and you want to take advantage of possible sale prices, but you also want to avoid cost increases and fully booked flights in the weeks just before travel. You choose the last responsible moment to book your travel using acquired knowledge and expectations about the future. In a construction site, there may be an LRM for finalizing excavation, another LRM for setting the forms, and yet another LRM for pouring the concrete.

Project managers who are new to LPS scheduling find this focus on the last responsible moment to be counter-intuitive, because once we identify the critical path, our intuition tells us to move things along the critical path as fast as possible. However, this presumes that you know everything there is to know about a project at the very beginning, which of course is never the case. In fact, focusing on the critical path sometimes causes us to do things earlier than we need to, which can lead to mistakes and rework as the needs of the project become clearer. In living order, we see projects as knowledge collection experiences, and therefore strive to put off doing any task until it is absolutely necessary. The LPS forces you to ask the question "How long can I defer this until I absolutely have to do it, because something else depends on it?"

When creating schedules in a Lean manufacturing environment, reducing batch sizes is an essential concept. Rather than scheduling a series of tasks to be completed once on a large batch, the small batch approach schedules many passes through the same series of tasks. This approach is more flexible and eliminates waste, ultimately increasing overall efficiency. It has been used successfully in paper mills, steel mills, and other industries (Preactor 2007). For more on small-batch scheduling, see this blog post: "Batch Scheduling in a Lean Manufacturing World".

In all industries, a well-thought-out schedule – one that stakeholders can rely on – forms the basis for the formal commitments between team members that, in the world of Lean and the LPS, are known as reliable promises. As you learned in Lesson 5, a reliable promise is predicated on a team member's honest assessment that she does indeed have the authority, competence, and capacity to make a promise, and a willingness to correct if she fails to follow through. A reliable promise identifies when a handoff will occur and the expectation that the receiver can be assured that the handoff will be complete and of the expected quality. For example, in the course of a project, stakeholders might make reliable promises regarding the completion of a required report, completion of a portion of software, or completion of a subcontractor's work on a designated portion of a building.