Welcome, my name is Sam Spata, and thank you for listening to this session on Lean Scheduling. I'm an Architect, and I bring a perspective that's somewhat unique. As an Executive Architect responsible for 25 years of major capital delivery. I am owner and principal of Method Lean specialty consultancy practice, helping owners, consultants the AIA Community and Contractors with Lean Project Delivery. In this course, the contents will begin with time, the paramount significance of time. Some basics of schedule. The idea of flow. And then, the heart of the course, Lean. And we will end with the request for your feedback. Let's talk about time and its paramount significance in everything we do. One of my favorite quotes from the Roman Poet Horace, Ars Longa, vita brevis, Latin is a very pity language and in four words what Horace is telling us is that, our art is long to master and the tragedy and shame is that our lives our vita is so brief. A more modern take on this concept of time and its significance is from the poet Delmore Schwartz. That time is the fire in which we burn. Now, time is something that affects every one of us and it's expressed in popular culture in many ways. One of my favorite expressions and my German is perhaps, is certainly not my first language [FOREIGN] "All things end, only sausage has two". And then, the popular culture of project delivery, it is often been said that there are three key factors, money quality and time. And we're often told, in Pre-Lean thinking that you can have two out of these three and the third must be traded off. Now, Lean thinking tells us that we can actually optimize all three. And before we get into Lean Scheduling I want to take a moment to acknowledge that there are some differences. You can, create more money. You can, increase quality. You cannot create more time. That is why it is profoundly significant in project delivery. And in fact, we will see that the better we manage time, the better we will manage both quality and money. When owners are asked what's important to them and what they value and this is recent data. We find that project schedule is at the top of their list of the things that they want to see on their projects. And when you look at the best performing projects, we see that the best performing projects for budget and cost are out performing two to one, the best performing projects for time. Time is something we need to work at Lean Scheduling can help us. I'll leave you with this last thought, no one ever made money by going over schedule. Manage your schedule and you are more than half way to success on your project. So, what are the fundamentals on your project that Lean will address? And actually incorporate with some new thinking. Well, push scheduling is typically how projects begin and in our culture we start on the far right hand side of the wall and put an end milestone. And then work our way to a start day, and it often feels like this. That we push back from commissioning to construction to procurement and design as the space leftover at the edge of the wall that's push scheduling. Now, what has come from that over the last 30, 40 years is a recognition that design done well needs a little bit more time. So, fast tracking breaks a project down into major components. Design is still the space left over at the edge of the wall, but there is a little bit more time. It's also great to your mall complexity because you're designing concurrently many different aspects, and you need to make decisions faster. One of the best things to come out of fast track is that it lends itself to batch thinking. And batch thinking is a key component of Lean Scheduling as we will see later in this course. Now, working backwards from an ending milestone is perfectly correct that's known as Reverse Planning. And if we work from the end back and pull succeeding tasks towards that end and define a start, that's a good thing. Starting with the end in mind and pulling the team along is an essential part of Lean Scheduling. Now, what are some of the fundamentals of schedule. The most important to my way of thinking is the milestone and I think, I suggest milestones comes in two very different flavors. There are milestones that are stars, they're dates certain, they are dates that absolutely positively must be met or there is failure and then there are interim milestones represented by the diamond. Interim milestones have some flexibility and may move within the control of the T. Whereas, the date certain milestones are generally in the control of the owner and are critical to their business training. Now, tasks are what define a schedule in between milestones. They are how we get from milestone to milestone. So, tasks is a job that needs to be done and it has a duration in time. And in this symbol, in this series here, we are using time as flowing. Times are from left to right. Now, what are the relationships between milestones and task to task? That's what builds up a schedule. Tasks might be sequential. You must end one test before you can begin another. You must lay the first level of brick before you can lay a second layer of brick. Some tasks however are concurrent. They may be happening at the precise same time. There are tasks that may be delayed. It may be that there is some flow time that, one task must finish. Perhaps the concrete must cure before anything can happen on top of that there's a delay and tasks may be staggered. That the first task may begin and then the second task may begin before the first task is completed. The relationships between all of these interim milestones, key milestones, date certain milestones. Tasks, their durations, this comes together to make a schedule. And the more parts, the more complexity, but at the bottom this is is what goes into a schedule. This is how you should begin thinking about every schedule you do including Lean thinking. My favorite type of schedule is the Gantt chart. The Gantt chart again times time arrow again moves from left to right and tasks start at the top and work their way down. The Gantt chart has both its logic the relationship between tasks and its visual management on a single sheet. This is important because good schedules are published. They don't just exist on a computer screen they exist on the wall frieze. So that the entire thing can see where we going. And a Gantt Chart is very good way to visualizing manage the relationship of test. It is easy to see is a simple breakdown. So, you see that you have tasks, durations, milestones, and the relationships are the staggering of the steps that you can see. The Gantt chart was invented more than a century ago and it was a prominent part of the logistics for the men and material that fought in World War I in Europe. Critical path method is a more recent type of scheduling, and it is probably the predominant form of schedule that's used in construction today. Now, the logic and the visual management are separate in critical path or CPM. The logic, those two were diagram, a flow chart if you will, so that it describes the critical path, the shortest way from the start to the end. If the critical path any one of these steps is, takes longer than it planned for, the schedule gets delayed. If it gets done sooner the schedule becomes accelerated. The visual management of CPM is generally shown in a chart that looks like this. Again, times are moving from left to right and the task are moving from top to bottom. What's new here is the indication of float time, it's early finishes, late finishes, and the relationships are very specific in terms of the lines that are shown. So, what you have with a CPM is, you see float plus our friends tasks, durations, milestones and relationships. This was again a war time necessity, part of the Manhattan Project and that's where CPM has its roots. Again, it is the predominant method of scheduling that we see in design and construction. Now, line of balance is a very curious animal. Line of balance is something that we may be seeing more of. Times arrow goes from left to right but from top to bottom does not exist, what we have from bottom to top are units. This is particularly good for a schedule where there are repetitive elements. And the tasks are slopes of units being completed over time, and where slopes across each other, you may well have discovered a conflict for your planning of the schedule. So, with the line of balance in addition to tasks, durations, milestones, relationships, we see units and conflicts very clearly. Now, the curious thing about line of balance is it really lends itself to a visual expression of productivity, what some call S curve thinking, and the beginnings to thinking about flow. How a tasks flows through a project over time towards its completion. And the predominant example that's used was the Empire State building in New York City. Where the steeler records, thought of their work as if it were a band, marching through the building and out the top. And so, wonderful quotation and it is probably the best expression of flow in construction. I think we're going to be seeing more of Line of Balance Scheduling in the years to come as Lean Scheduling takes precedence.
