When coaching teams to use the Last Planner System we include recommendations that facility owners, architects and engineers participate in the weekly commitment planning that the team in the field building the project uses. A common response is that ‘management’ and ‘design’ work is different and not amenable to the structure the weekly planning imposes.

So (finally) taking my own medicine I have been working with making a weekly commitment plan for myself, and have been at it the last four weeks. My initial Percent Plan Complete (planned actions completed divided by total planned actions) was 54%. Last Planner Users will appreciate the irony. Note I am including commitments made to others, mostly work related, and commitments made to myself, both work and personal in nature. This week’s evaluation:

Plus: Creating standard work via checklists for actions that repeat daily, weekly and monthly allows actions to be completed more quickly and completely; Having all the work planned for the day visible makes task selection decisions to be made more quickly; Seeing actions planned for upcoming days is helpful in catching any missed make ready work; Maintaining an eight week lookahead board is facilitating more complete make ready planning and limiting last minute scrambling. Breaking actions that cannot be completed in a single effort is increasing the amount of work accomplished.

Delta: Evaluate carefully how much work can be done on a given day to eliminate unrealistic commitments; Plan days so that workable backlog actions can be addressed; Find a way to reduce the amount of actions in workable backlog, either by planning them on the lookahead plan or eliminating them altogether.