In 2002, at a meeting at the Institute of Project Management in Seattle, Greg Howell presented a paper he wrote with Laurie Koskeler in which they compared the Last Planner System to a critical path method. Greg used this opportunity to demonstrate how the Last Planner system was a superior method for project planning and control.
The response from the audience was less enthusiastic. During Greg’s presentation, a member stood up and shouted, “You lie, you lie!” This sometimes happens when someone challenges inspired practices.
And that’s exactly what the Last Planner system does. It turns the whole idea of planning into his head because it allows people in the field to plan detailed work. The method is based on an observation that it is not really for people and scheduling experts who have really better information to plan the best-known work.
Like many ideas, the last planning system evolved. As reported in the first post, it started in the 1980s with the concept of crew level planning called Glenn. That front-line supervisor, Last Planners, need to know who can get the job done, based on what the project schedule is, rather than planning their workweek, so they can get the job done more productively. This allows weekly work planning and daily work execution to run more smoothly. Soon, a weekly action plan approach was created.
Through this weekly work plan approach comes a complete measure of the percentage plan, which Glenn presented to the Northern California Construction Institute in a paper he wrote in 1994. For the week. Percent Plan Complete is complemented by a Pareto process that helps project teams learn to improve the reliability of their plans using diversity analysis. Feedback has been incorporated into The Last Planner system as a process to improve, and it is this feedback that allows teams to do groundbreaking work that results in greater productivity.
The other two stages of evolution were make-ready planning and phase planning. The make-ready process was first described in print in 1994 in an IGLC paper by Glenn and Greg entitled “Stackbilizing Workflow.” They’ve been working on a make-ready process since the 190s that a project could have the full results of a one-percent plan and still fall behind schedule. In this case, higher productivity exceeds the materials needed to move on to the next part of the project. Good preparation has helped to solve that problem with good preparation.
The phased plan was developed later in the 1990s. Glenn thinks the first example of a tension plan is from a project team workshop for a lean back group project, where Mike Daly of the Ninan Group suggested setting a back-to-back schedule on the wall. This workshop took place in 1998 or early 1999. Applicable to the field, it continued the notion that those responsible for the work had a role to play in creating a plan that they would understand and support. Plans at this stage are developed at a general level, more functional details are added as work is done and it becomes necessary to be informed.
Since Glenn’s doctoral thesis last planner system is constantly evolving with the contribution of many people. Glenn and Iris Tomlin from Project Production Systems Laboratory (P2SL) recently released the 2020 Current Process Benchmark for the final planning system for project planning and control. It is such that the system will not be fully completed, subject to ongoing continuous improvement.
The Last Planner system is based on the understanding that people need clear, productive conversations about their commitments in order to get things done, and that their requests need to be addressed so that they can fulfill those commitments. The Last Planner System is a framework for that conversation, so people understand requests and commitments. For many project teams, this is the basic lean construction practice they use, often with valuable benefits.
A study conducted by Dodge Data and Analytics found that projects using practice are more likely to end ahead of schedule and under budget. Among contractors using thinner construction methods, reported higher quality construction, reported higher customer satisfaction, %% reported higher productivity, and %% reported improved safety. These results have been repeated consistently.