Ian Heptinstall

Standing around waiting is an interesting one, because there are good and bad reasons for standing around waiting. There is a saying in the critical chain/TOC community that you want 'Resources waiting for work, not work waiting for people". The idea being that when work on the critical path/chain is ready to be started it should begin a milli-second after the previous task is completed. You want to minimise queues of work waiting to be worked upon. (Note not eliminate, some queue/buffer actually helps manage complex flow work). To start working as soon as possible, in general you need some degree of excess resource - protective capacity. This kind of waiting around is what you see with a Formula One pit crew between tyre changes. The race is won because resource is waiting for the work to arrive. Bad waiting is when you start work and discover something is missing. An approval, a tool, a component or a specialist resource. It is this stop-start working that wastes resource. Lean Construction & Critical Chain explicitly address this with ideas like look-ahead, WIP limitation, 'full-kit' and policies about not starting a task until you have everything needed to complete. Construction practice often drive exactly the opposite behaviour with supervision practices and stage-payment rules. Local productivity measures and clamping down on people hanging around can be counter-productive. They can lead to keeping all your resources very busy and thinking this is productive. All the while your critical path has to wait until a busy resource becomes free. The resources seem to be very productive. But your project takes 3 times longer than it needs to.

Hi Simon. Balanced scorecard guru Robert Kaplan, in a 2014 HRB article, highlighted the dilemma here. If you want to reduce cost, don't cut costs. His point was that cost is an outcome measure that measures how well you manage the overall system. If you just take cost centres and cut their budgets, with no understanding of how your organisation adds value, the chances are you will end up cutting yourself out of business. Or increasing costs in order to serve your customers. Same with productivity. If you try and make your projects more productive by sprinkling some productivity initiatives around your business, you have little chance of success. Systems theory tells us that the system performance is driven by how everything comes together, not how well individual parts do by themselves. If contractors want to increase their profitability they need to add more value - not for themselves but for their customers. If the only value they add is by buying from someone else, adding a mark-up and reselling as a one-stop shop, then single-figure return-on-sales profit margins seems reasonable. That is all supermarkets make. One opportunity for them is to manage the complicated work flows of a project much better than anyone else. Don't just put a project supply chain together, but manage it in a way that is an order of magnitude better than if you just let it sort itself out. This will deliver the project much faster, at lower cost, and probability with higher quality. On capex projects many clients do not want to get involved in doing this, leaving a niche for others to step into. And I'm not sure it would be that easy to copy. Take for example M&S that could easily have copied some core aspects of Zara/Inditex's supply chain over the past 25 years. But it didn't, it relied on more conventional management approaches - including travelling the world in search of lower purchase prices - whilst Zara made much more profit from more local suppliers and great supply chain management.

A great case study @Simon Murray. Why do you think the knowledge of managing building projects from 100 years ago seems to have been lost to the project management and construction professions? As you mention, and can be seen from their autobiographies, Paul & Bill Starrett brought both an intimate understanding of building projects, and a practical desire for continuous improvement. There might have been a connection to the Scientific Management movement of the same period in the UK triggered by Taylor and followers in manufacturing, but I've not come across any specific references. Do you know any? The photo in your main article shows No1 World Trade Centre in the background. 90 years after the ESB this took us about 6x longer to build and cost about 8x more /m2 (30% over budget). A compare-and-contrast would be fascinating.