Last Planner? System - How to get the most out of the Percent Plan Complete

Yeah, I know. Today’s topic and title are really going to reduce my number of readers. Percent Plan Complete (PPC) is not sexy (unlike most of my other posts :-D). It’s also only relevant to a certain percentage of the people in my network. All of that said, I still think it’s an important topic, and maybe a post about it will reach someone that is really struggling with this aspect of the Last Planner? System right now.

So what is Percent Plan Complete? Well, according to the glossary on the Lean Construction Institute’s website (www.leanconstruction.org):

“Percent Plan Complete (PPC) – A basic measure of how well the planning system is working – calculated as the 'number of promises/activities completed on the day stated” divided by the “total number of promises/activities made/planned for the week'. It measures the percentage of assignments that are 100% complete as planned.”

Simple, right? Well, maybe not. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the PPC may be the most misunderstood and misused tool of the Last Planner System. Let’s talk about some of those misunderstandings and misuses:

Which activities receive a YES, and which receive a NO?

If your team is using the Weekly Work Plan (WWP) spreadsheet to plan your work for the upcoming week, you know that the right side of the sheet is for tracking which activities were/were not completed according to the plan, the specific reason for the variance, and the category of variance (so the team can watch for trends in deviations). Step one, and the key to calculating the correct PPC, is assigning a YES or NO to each promised activity.

Clearly, if an activity is completed later than committed, it would receive a NO. An activity completed on the precise days committed would receive a YES. However, and this is very important, if an activity is completed earlier than committed, it also receives a NO. At the end of the week, the number of activities that received a YES is divided by the total number of activities included on the team’s WWP to determine the percentage of activities completed reliably – the Percent Plan Complete.

Let’s take a minute to elaborate on the part of that explanation that causes teams some consternation.

Why would you assign a NO to an activity that was completed EARLY? Isn’t that a good thing?!?

To understand the answer to this question, the team first needs to see that a YES or NO is not inherently good or bad. It is merely a fact, and if that fact is that a task was not completed as planned, we, as a team, need to understand why so we can take action to be more reliable in the future. For this reason, when an activity is not completed according to plan, whether early or late, the follow-up should focus on identifying the root cause for the discrepancy. As a rule of thumb, this typically requires that the question, “Why?” be asked 5 times…

·      “Why was the activity completed late?”

·      “It took longer than we expected.”

·      “Why?”

·      “Because we didn’t have the right equipment.”

·      “Why not?”

·      “We didn’t realize the extent of work that would be required.”

·      “Why not?”

·      “We weren’t able to do the necessary site investigation before we planned the work.”

·      “Why not?”

·      “The Owner needed a week’s notice, and we only gave them 3 days.”

After this exchange, the team would identify the detailed reason, choose the category of “Coordination,” and, if similar problems persist, actively seek opportunities to avoid the problem in the future.

But you’re still asking yourself, “Why isn’t completing an activity early a good thing?!?”

Despite the fact that we will diligently work to avoid positive and negative connotations for YES and NO, the fact remains that YES will be viewed as positive and NO will be viewed as negative. Therefore, by assigning a YES to work completed early, we are incentivizing the last planners to “sandbag,” or add a day or two to each promised activity. When work is completed earlier than promised on the WWP, the last planner to whom the work is handed off is not likely to be able to adjust and start earlier than planned, so we will not gain anything when work is completed early. We will, however, lose time each time work is completed late. That is why reliability is more important than beating our commitments. Our goal, as a team, is to continuously improve on the reliability of our promises. This means that sometimes activities will take longer than promised, and sometimes they will be completed sooner than promised. As long as we view each deviation as an opportunity to improve, the reliability of promises, and the PPC, will improve as the team becomes better at planning reliably.

We don’t really need to use that tool, do we?

In my experience, the PPC is the tool that teams are most likely to decide they can ignore in their Last Planner implementation. I get it. The Last Planner System is a great way to collaboratively plan upcoming work. PPC is a metric that communicates how well we’re planning. That’s nice, but we’re busy, and we’re just going to skip it, OK?

Remember, one of the Six Tenets of Lean Construction is Continuous Improvement. Generally, that is achieved through a deliberate application of Plan-Do-Check-Adjust (P-D-C-A). In design and construction, we’re pretty good at Planning and Doing (even if we don’t always do it well), but we tend to fall a little short on Checking and Adjusting. It’s understandable. Assessing our results and making adjustments to our plans require the dreaded PAUSE in action that we have all been conditioned to believe is a waste of time and will only put us further behind. We, as an industry, need to challenge that belief. In the same way that many of us now understand that taking the time to plan enhances, rather than diminishes, our chances of success, we need to realize that taking time to assess our performance and adjust to improve will also improve our ultimate results.

You have probably put a lot of resources (in the form of team training, planning sessions, personnel, materials, etc.) into your Last Planner System implementation. That’s huge! PPC is the tool you should be using to assess and improve your level of success.

This is a great way to measure the performance of our field team/subcontractors, right?

I have spoken with multiple companies and project teams that use the PPC as a way to judge the effectiveness of their employees and subcontractors. I’ve heard of it being used as a discussion point and even condition of pay increases/bonuses during annual reviews. I’m here to tell you that is a dangerous use of this metric.

First, the goal of the PPC is to measure the reliability of your team’s planning. (Are you sick of me saying that yet? I hope not. I’ll probably say it more.) Let’s face it. We have been conditioned for decades NOT to make reliable commitments. I would say that most teams I work with start in the 30-55% range for their PPC. That’s not great, but it’s true, and therefore a good gauge of how we typically fare on a traditionally-managed project. Through a respectful implementation of the PPC process (objective root cause analysis of deviations / avoidance of blame / pursuit of continuous improvement), the team will improve.

Second… shhh, don’t tell anyone… the PPC can be manipulated. As Mark Twain said, “Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable.” You want a higher PPC? Sandbag, and assign a YES to work completed early. Leave activities off the WWP, so they don’t go into the PPC calculation at all. Adjust the WWP throughout the week, so your final analysis is more appealing. When you appropriately incentivize dishonesty, you will most certainly get it.

For our third point, let’s take a page out of the Toyota play book. Toyota utilizes something called an “Andon Cord” on their assembly lines. Basically, if anyone on the line notices a production deviation, they are not only allowed, they are expected to pull the cord and stop the line. A supervisor immediately goes to the station, thanks the employee that pulled the cord, and asks how they can help. They are EXPECTED to report the problem, they are THANKED for stopping production, and they are SUPPORTED in improving the process. That. Is. Huge.

Mike Rother tells a story in his book, Toyota Kata, about a certain shift at a Toyota plant that dropped from 1000 Andon pulls per shift to 700 Andon pulls per shift. Maybe that sounds awesome to you… not to Toyota. They held an all-hands meeting to identify the problem that obviously existed. PROBLEM. The problem was proposed to be one of two things: We’re either letting more defects pass without fixing them, or we’re not working up to our potential.

That is a major departure from the way we typically judge challenges in our work, but it has been proven over and over (Toyota, Alcoa, Amazon, etc.) that an aggressive effort to identify and address failures in the value stream leads to overall improvements in productivity, quality, and cost. In order to reliably identify failures, you can’t punish the people closest to the work for pointing them out.

I regularly get asked what I would like to see on a PPC graph (percentages plotted over time). I always say that I expect you to start around 50%, gradually increase with expected dips along the way, and, when your team starts hitting 80-85% on a regular basis, hit the gas. At that point you’ve improved, and you’re no longer working up to your potential. Do you know what happens when you hit the gas? Your PPC goes down, until you work your way up again. If I, as a subcontractor or project manager or superintendent, know that my compensation or bonus is tied to my PPC, I promise you I will not be “hitting the gas.”

Honestly, folks, I think I could talk about PPC all day, but you’ve really hung in there, and I’ve hit all of my big points, so I’m going to stop here. I would love to hear your thoughts about PPC in the comments, though!

And, now that you’ve made it this far, you may as well hang around for a little self-promotion. ?? G3C will be hosting some Lean Book Studies in September and October. Join a team, and we’ll read Transforming Design & Construction: A Framework for Change together, over the course of four weeks. If that sounds good to you, please register at https://glassmeyerconsulting.brushfire.com/events/474010 , and if you think someone you know would be interested, please share!

PS – I’m on Twitter, and I am just tickled every time I get a new follower! Please follow me @G3C_Consulting. 

Julie Glassmeyer is the Owner of Glassmeyer Construction Consulting & Coaching, LLC (G3C). Julie applies her 27 years of commercial construction management and planning experience to support individuals and organizations in their efforts to reach the next level of performance excellence. G3C, LLC, specializes in Lean Construction and Professional Writing. For more information, please visit www.glassmeyerconsulting.com, or contact Julie at [email protected] or 513.635.2730. Follow her on Twitter - @G3C_Consulting!