Lean Design using Microsoft Office Excel and Newforma Project Center

Romano N.A. Nickerson, AIA
Principal, Boulder Associates Architects

Todd Henderson, AIA, LEED AP
Senior Associate, Boulder Associates Architects

Design and construction projects tend to be races against time. Yet by using the project management method described in this article, our firm Boulder Associates recently completed a $4 million medical imaging center in 85 percent of the time originally scheduled. We did it by following the precepts of lean construction, which removes obstacles to work and gives project team members a means to meet and exceed schedules as they reduce and eliminate rework. This article describes the four-step process that was used to implement lean management in their firm.

The Metrics of Lean Design

Lean construction extends to the construction industry the lean production revolution started in manufacturing. The idea is to maximize value delivered to the customer by minimizing waste.
Lean construction operates under a few simple principles:

• Work goes faster when you remove obstructions that prevent work from being accomplished.

• The people doing the work are best qualified to schedule their work, which the Lean Construction Institute calls the principle of the Last Planner™.

There’s one other principle to state at the outset, which is that design and construction projects are organized as networks of commitments. Project team members make promises—commitments—to one another in order to complete their project on an agreed schedule.

Lean construction concerns itself with capturing and managing those commitments.

Like most firms, Boulder Associates project teams meet weekly to discuss work that has occurred and work that needs to occur. We also have daily five-minute standup meetings to talk about that day’s work. In those meetings we capture and track three metrics:

• First, we count the number of tasks completed and put that number over the number of tasks promised. For example, if you promised you’d do five tasks and completed four, that’s 4/5, or 80 percent. That metric is our planned percent complete, or PPC.

• Second, we see how good we are at planning ahead. How many of our commitments were planned more than a week in advance? We call those tasks anticipated. If three of the four tasks you completed were anticipated a week or more in advance, your tasks anticipated metric would be 3/4, or 75 percent. (Pretty good! Your co-workers must appreciate your ability to avoid fire drills.)

• Third, we examine the variance between what was promised and what was accomplished. The purpose here is not to assign blame, but to discover opportunities for removing obstacles. For example, if team members are not getting the information they need, or the owner is not responding to requests, the team leader may want to intervene on their behalf.

With these three metrics in hand, we track and maintain performance over time to look at trends.

The tools we use to capture and track these metrics are Microsoft Office Excel—the spreadsheet application almost everyone uses—and the Action Items activity center in Newforma Project Center, the software we use in our firm for project information management (PIM).

The Use of Excel and Newforma Project Center

We have used Excel to create a Last Planner spreadsheet, a streamlined, custom document that permits the team to track commitments without stopping discussions. It permits data entry as quickly as people speak out their commitments in the daily meetings. We’ve also designed the spreadsheet in such a way as to display commitments visually, which is important in an organization comprised of visually oriented people. The person editing the spreadsheet projects it on a screen for all to see. So, for example, if we need a team member in the architectural working group to issue a third-floor PDF to someone else on the project team, we can note in the spreadsheet who’s requesting the PDF and who’s the promiser —the person who will create and deliver the PDF. We can quickly enter that information, and a due date, as people speak.  The finished document replaces meeting notes, providing a record who has agreed to do what, by when.

After capturing the promises made in the meeting, we import the spreadsheet data into Newforma Project Center as action items.  Newforma provides a database in which to sort, assign, track and report on the project’s activities. Internal team members, all of whom use Newforma Project Center, can find what they have to do and mark as complete those tasks they finish. The Action Items activity center permits team members to create action items while reading and answering email; while reviewing a drawing, BIM model or PDF in the Newforma Viewer; or from any other activity center in Newforma Project Center. Email, markups or supporting documents associated with the action item can be electronically linked to it as well, providing a permanent connection and audit trail of related information.

If we’re assigning the task to someone who’s not in the room or is an external consultant on the project team, Newforma software also makes it easy to assign the action item—or rather, the commitment—to that person. The software notifies team members by email, and can be set to send email reminders at time periods the manager designates.

Let’s say a week has gone by, and it’s an hour before this working group meets again. We use the Newforma Action Items database to sort by date, working groups and other parameters we’d like to see, and export the data to an updated version of the Last Planner spreadsheet. This spreadsheet compiles the data organized in Newforma Project Center into the categories critical to lean design. It displays planned percent complete, or PPC; the tasks anticipated; the variances, and the trends, allowing us to look at these metrics as described at the beginning of this article.

Without having Newforma PIM software, we could not easily track this data across projects or individuals. But now we can slice and dice as we want to see what patterns emerge. Could it be that every project with XYZ contractor reveals a pattern? In addition to the immediate, day-to-day benefits of the lean metrics that we are capturing and logging, the project information gained by this methodology has equity to the firm over time.

Taking Time to Plan

The time we invest in planning meetings and tracking our lean metrics has paid off in terms of mitigating waste. Our planning meetings with this system have not become any longer than before, and we spend far, far less time re-doing work, because we planned it sufficiently at the outset.

There are additional benefits as well. These detailed reports on fulfilled commitments meet the high standards of accountability and transparency required of IPD (integrated project delivery). Also, clients appreciate these reports in the billing statements of conventionally delivered projects. For example, we recently took a month-long range for billing, pulled the completed commitments, exported to a spreadsheet to show when the work was accomplished, added data to track PPC and work anticipated for the month, and delivered it to the client via email. The whole process took only about 15 minutes. Without the Newforma database that could display all action items closed in the last month in the Action Items activity center, Boulder Associates would not have able to provide that level of detail in its billing.

Summary

Lean design hinges on the concept of Last Planner, under the philosophy that the people doing the work are best qualified to schedule their work. At Boulder Associates, we use Excel spreadsheets and the Newforma Project Center Action Items activity center to capture and track three metrics:

1. Planned percent complete, or PPC
2. Tasks anticipated
3. Variance

We also follow trends displayed by these metrics over time.

We use Microsoft Office Excel and Newforma Project Center to capture, manage and display our data in the following way:

1. We use a spreadsheet to capture commitments in meetings.
2. We import the spreadsheet into Newforma’s project information management software to sort and manage the data.
3. At the next meeting, we export data into another spreadsheet to report commitments to the team.

Following this process mitigates waste, avoiding overproduction and rework. It’s how we’re delivering more value to our clients, which is the whole point of lean construction.

About the Authors

Romano N.A. Nickerson, AIA, and Todd Henderson, AIA, LEED AP, are Principal and Senior Associate respectively at Boulder Associates Architects, which specializes in senior living, ambulatory care and acute care facilities. The firm pursues design that promotes comfort and healing, increases happiness and independence among seniors, and brings the community together. Boulder Associates has offices in Boulder, Colorado; Sacramento, California; and Orange County, California. Its completed projects span 40 states. For more about Boulder Associates, visit www.boulderassociates.com.

For more about lean construction and the Lean Construction Institute, visit www.leanconstruction.org.

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