We have already blogged about what “Lean Construction” is: all about cutting down on wasted time and materials in a construction project. The other thing that was pointed out was that the waste of both can vary pretty dramatically due to different construction cultures, country by country.
Moving on a bit, all the Professional Institutions I’m aware of identify seven stages for any construction project, albeit they all seem to have different names for them! Now let’s have a look at the diagram below which is the one put out by the Lean Project Organisation:-
The first thing you’ll notice is that this has five inverted triangles, overlapping each other. The second thing you’ll notice is that none seem to be labelled as anything they are called by any of the Professional Institutions. So what does that leave us with?
Well, bearing in mind that my introduction to the idea of Lean Construction was when a PhD student contacted me to pick my brains, I tend to feel that the “Lean Project Delivery System” is a bit irrelevant to Construction. It seems to be something for either vested interest to pursue or post-graduate students to research and, hopefully, add to!
The simplicity of “Lean Construction”, cutting down on wasted time and materials, we should strive for all the time in all national construction cultures.
“The Lean Project Delivery System”, forget all about it! It seems to have no relevance to actual construction at all!