Without thinking a superintendent announces to the foremen on a project team to not plan on any vacation next summer. That’s how people who work on school renovation projects have been conditioned to think – and work. There is a limited amount of time between when students leave campus at the end of the school year and return at the beginning of the next school year. With only about ten to twelve weeks to get a lot of work completed there is a reason these projects are called “summer slammers.”

Take a summer vacation and you may as well not come back – someone else will be given your job. That was, and remains, the pre-Lean way of thinking on construction projects.

I remember one of the first Lean projects we completed. It was just the superintendent and project engineer representing the construction manager on site every day, with the engineer managing the Last Planner System. The engineer took a week off for vacation in August – unheard of for this type of project. What happened? The work continued running smoothly and the project was completed on time with none of the typical last minute heroics required by summer slammers.

Adding a Lean approach to your building projects, as many superintendents, project engineers, and project managers will attest,  lets you keep your life.