Building Project Team Excellence: Insights from Athletic Training

Introduction

Like sports teams, project teams require conditioning and nutrition to deliver optimal results. Many capital projects fail to finish on time and within budget because they are "out of shape." The project team’s communication and processes are weak, too slow, and unable to keep up with the demands of the project.

Applying the Fitness Conditioning Metaphor to Project Teams

Athletes focus on building strength and speed, both generally and specific to their sport. The key to gains in both is progressive overload. Progressive overload is a principle in strength training where the weight lifted or the number of repetitions is gradually increased over time to build strength and endurance. This gradual increase minimizes the risk of injury or burnout. Similar approaches can be applied to aerobic activities, such as running or swimming, by gradually increasing speed or distance.

Factors involved in any progressive overload approach include intensity, weight, speed, duration, repetitions, and distance.

Conditioning Design and Construction Management Skills

Design and construction management practices are skills that can be enhanced. A common mistake is treating these practices as simple skills that, once learned, are mastered. Project teams that avoid this mistake and focus on continually improving their skills set themselves up for success.

Whether or not your project team is explicitly implementing lean design and construction practices, you rely on an array of systems and processes to complete your work. You can, and should, apply the progressive overload concept to improving those systems and processes.

Skill Progression Areas

• Daily coordination
• Strategic workflow planning
• Leadership and project stewardship
• Process mapping
• Performance measurement

What About Nutrition?

For athletes, nutrition is the fuel that provides energy for thinking, movement, and coordination. Proper nutrition is vital to good health and high performance. An athlete’s nutrition plan is as important as their conditioning plan.

For project teams, nutrition comes in the form of information. Three types of information play important roles:

1. Performance Measurements: Good performance metrics go beyond projected days ahead or behind and budget projections. Performance metrics measure how well your management and coordination systems are performing. An example is the Percent Plan Complete (PPC) measurement employed in the Last Planner System?. However, individual measurements can be misleading without context. For example, PPC is meaningless without understanding Tasks Anticipated, Tasks Made Ready, and Average Weekly Plan Task Duration. - - - Every process implemented during a project should have several performance measurements to inform improvements. Most building project teams use very few measurements and therefore have little awareness of how they are performing on a daily, or even week-to-week basis. Contrast this to a Formula 1 racing team, which is measuring around 300 data points on a car. Arguably, the financial consequences of a poorly performing building project are significant, yet many teams have little information, and therefore control, over the direction of their project.
2. Project Plan Retrospectives and Stress Testing: Retrospectives should be frequent, rather than end-of-project ‘lessons learned’ reports that are filed away. The purpose of a retrospective is to assess how to leverage what has been learned through plan performance and make advantageous changes. Stress testing exposes the upcoming project plan to possible events outside the control of the project team, helping the team improve planning to be resilient to risks and opportunistic when good luck arises.
3. Books and Articles: There is a wealth of information written by people who, through their experiences, observations, and research, have recorded ideas your team can use to improve its performance. Reading circles and study action teams are effective because several minds can translate general ideas and principles into specific actions and improvements to their project.

Summary

Athletic teams are good performance models for building project teams. Every athletic team has methods for conditioning strength, speed, and coordination skills. They also understand the importance of nutrition. Many athletes have strict guidelines for their meals. When athletes and their teams are not getting stronger and fitter, they are getting weaker and less competitive.

Building project teams are similar. They need project management and coordination skills conditioning to achieve higher levels of performance. They need performance measurement and improvement information to support skills conditioning. A project team is either getting stronger or weaker. There is no status quo.

Supplement – Progressive Overload for Daily Coordination Skill Development

I developed the following guide to progressive daily coordination skill development for capital project teams. This is only one area of skills development for project teams.

The steps identify progressive levels of skill, with the recommendation that after mastering a skill, the project team moves toward developing the next identified skill. It is possible to skip over some skills or develop them slightly out of sequence. The skill progressions are one path for implementing the Last Planner System? weekly and daily elements.

Definitions

For people less familiar with Last Planner System practices I use these terms in the skill progression descriptions.

• Crew Leaders: Using Last Planner System terminology, these people are Last Planners? responsible for assigning work to crews. Typically for construction activities, these people are trade foremen or superintendents, and in some cases may be construction management staff members assigning work to small trade contractors. For design activities, these people are usually project managers.
• Weekly Work Plan: A weekly plan developed by people responsible for assigning work to crews, for either design or construction work. The plan includes only work that can be completed based on a realistic assessment of task preparedness and available resources.
• Weekly Coordination Meeting: A work session lasting no longer than one hour during which a project team reviews work forecasts, understood as commitments, for the following week.
• Team Lead: A person, usually working for the architect or builder, responsible for managing one or more elements of the coordination system. Team lead roles can be rotated among different people if each team lead responsibility remains assigned to an identified person.
• Lookahead Plan: The planned tasks for the next three to ten weeks. Normally project teams use a four- or six-week lookahead window.

Skill Progressions

1. Every crew leader has prepared a work plan for the week that specifically identifies the work that will be completed by the end of the week. The work plan only includes work that crew leaders are confident will be completed during the week. The work plans are public and available to all crew leaders.
2. Crew leaders huddle daily for no more than 15 minutes to update each other on the status of their work, referencing their weekly work plan.
3. Crew leaders rotate responsibility for leading the daily huddle.
4. Crew leaders meet each week to review their weekly work plans for the following week in a weekly coordination meeting. Each crew leader stands while discussing their work plan, which is either displayed on a monitor or screen, or available as a printed document for all crew leaders.
5. Weekly coordination meetings end with either a structured Plus/Delta assessment or a casual request for comments on how the meetings can better serve crew leaders and other participants.
6. Weekly work plans are posted in the field office and in locations on the jobsite.
7. Following each week, the number of planned tasks completed across the project is divided by the number of tasks in all the weekly work plans to calculate a Percent Plan Complete percentage.
8. The weekly Percent Plan Complete trend is tracked, with the trend updated weekly and posted in the field office.
9. The project team reviews the weekly Percent Plan Complete trend during the weekly coordination meeting.
10. Crew leaders classify each plan variance according to predetermined categories and provide a brief written description assessing the cause for the plan variance.
11. Each week, a team lead identifies the most common plan variance category and, using a problem-solving approach, determines and implements a response intended to mitigate plan variances in that category.
12. The project team reviews plan variances and mitigation responses during the weekly coordination meeting.
13. The display of the project weekly work plan during the weekly coordination meeting sorts the tasks by zones in the project to promote an awareness of tasks planned for the same physical parts of the project and the relationships between those tasks.
14. During the weekly coordination meeting, a lookahead plan is displayed, with tasks sorted by zones, so that the relationship between the tasks planned in the weekly work plan and tasks in the lookahead plan is displayed.
15. Every crew leader prepares daily completion objectives in their weekly work plan. The duration of every task on the weekly work plan is one day.
16. Crew leaders rotate responsibility for leading the weekly coordination meeting.
17. All daily huddles are held at a movable huddle board that includes a posted current weekly work plan, current lookahead plan, and floor plans with zone designations.
18. In the daily huddle, each crew leader verbally declares for each daily task planned to be completed in the prior 24 hours whether it was started and completed as planned. Crew leaders classify each plan variance according to predetermined categories and provide a brief written description assessing the cause for the plan variance.
19. In the daily huddle, each crew leader identifies tasks performed that were not identified on their weekly work plan. A team lead records the tasks to calculate a weekly Tasks Anticipated trend. Tasks anticipated for the week is the percentage of tasks on the weekly work plan divided by the sum of the tasks on the weekly work plan plus the number of tasks performed that were not on the weekly work plan.
20. Crew leaders classify each unanticipated task according to predetermined categories and provide a brief written description assessing the cause for the plan variance.
21. The project team reviews the weekly Tasks Anticipated trend during the weekly coordination meeting.
22. Each week, a team lead identifies the most common unanticipated task category and, using a problem-solving approach, determines and implements a response intended to mitigate unanticipated tasks in that category.
23. The project team reviews unanticipated tasks and mitigation responses during the weekly coordination meeting.
24. The project conducts multiple concurrent daily huddles, each dedicated to a separate type of workflows and set of crews.
25. Each week, a team lead calculates the percentage of tasks planned for the current week three weeks earlier on the lookahead plan that are ready and included in the current week’s weekly work plan. This percentage is called Tasks Made Ready, which is tracked as a weekly trend.
26. The project team reviews the weekly Tasks Made Ready trend and mitigation responses during the weekly coordination meeting.
27. In the daily huddle each crew leader reports the duration of variation for planned work completion in terms of hours. A team lead tracks task completion variation trends for the project.
28. The project team reviews task completion variation trends during the weekly coordination meeting.
29. Daily, following each daily huddle, a team lead investigates the cause of every plan variation and unanticipated task identified during the huddle. They assess a probable causes and planning recommendations from this investigation, documenting these in a brief report. The report is distributed to all crew leaders before the next daily huddle.
30. Every crew leader prepares half-day completion objectives in their weekly work plan. The duration of every task on the weekly work plan is one-half day. This half-day standard is applied to identifying plan variances for the week.

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