Jiri’s Notepad

Lean construction:

“What are you doing here?” they asked.They were construction foremen, superintendents and project managers attending a course in construction planning from the Lean Construction Institute (LCI). Indeed, what was I doing there?

I started to explain: “In software development, we are told we should manage our projects like construction projects, where a building is designed at the start, cost and schedule are predictable, and customers get what they expect.”

Silence. “You’re kidding, right?” “No, honest, that’s what we’re told.”

Incredulity turns to laughter. The idea that programmers would want to manage projects like the construction industry strikes my classmates as ludicrous.

They struggle every day with a master schedule which bears little relationship to reality, with materials that should be on site but are not, or materials that need to be stored because they arrived before they were needed. The never know when the crew that precedes them will be ready to turn an area over to them, so they never know how to staff their crews. They are plagued constantly by the two biggest forms of construction waste - people waiting for materials and work waiting for people.