Glenn Ballard

• PhD
• Managing Director at University of California, Berkeley

Psychological safety is a construct that has garnered attention in academia and industries over the last two decades. Research has shown the connection between psychological safety and several team behaviors, from learning to active caring. Most research however has focused on exploring psychological safety within traditional teams. This paper exte...

Research Question: How to extend the Last Planner System ® to planning the entire project? Purpose: To provide one planning and control system for both project and production, and to improve project level planning. Research Method: Design science research method Findings: Project execution planning is the appropriate focus for extending the Last Pl...

The development of Lean principles within the public sector began in 2003 following Lean Construction Institute´s developing efforts on relational contracting. Later, challenges and opportunities for implementing Lean were identified in Californian construction law. Collaborations with entities like the California Department of Transportation and t...

Target Value Delivery (TVD) is a process for setting project value targets and the corresponding cost targets prior to design, then steering design and construction to those targets. Doing so has proven to consistently deliver value for money. This paper describes how TVD differs from other project delivery processes and how to do TVD successfully.

A relevant problem in the construction sector is low productivity due to the high variability and uncertainty of projects, which makes it necessary to increase efficiency through better project planning and control. The last planner system (LPS) has proven to increase planning reliability; however, improving the management of commitments in weekly...

The Last Planner® System (LPS)3 was initially designed as a system for planning and controlling production on projects, that is, to do what is necessary to achieve set targets (Ballard 2000). It was understood to differ from project controls, which sets targets (objectives and constraints on their delivery) and monitors progress toward them. Initia...

The average cost and time overrun of frequent changes in ETO and construction projects is high, and with steadily increasing cost constraints, productivity increase is critical for future competitiveness. Successful lean implementations in project-based production systems have led to great reductions in waste and time to market. However, companies...

Twenty-first century infrastructure needs to respond to changing demographics, becoming climate neutral, resilient and economically affordable, while remaining a driver for development and shared prosperity. However, the infrastructure sector remains one of the least innovative and digitalised, plagued by delays, cost overruns and benefit shortfall...

Twenty-first century infrastructure needs to respond to changing demographics, becoming climate neutral, resilient and economically affordable, while remaining a driver for development and shared prosperity. However, the infrastructure sector remains one of the least innovative and digitalised, plagued by delays, cost overruns and benefit shortfall...

The focus of this study is the applicability of the Last Planner System (LPS) to modular offshore wind construction. Following a design science approach, a conceptual model for LPS adapted to modular offshore wind construction was developed, then refined and evaluated in a field study. The field study investigated was an offshore wind project in th...

A behavior-based approach to quality has been proposed to highlight the impact that upstream behaviors have on the overall outcomes of construction projects. The focus of this pioneering approach is first to understand that certain behaviors lead to conversations in which expectations are clearly identified and understood by the different project p...

The correct implementation of the Last Planner® System has been proven to increase the reliability of the planning and performance levels of projects by managing commitments. However, the current management of commitments in weekly planning meetings has not been sufficiently analyzed to teach people how to make reliable promises. Therefore, it is e...

There is an increasing trend towards more integrated project delivery (IPD) methods in the construction industry. However, the definition of IPD and its practical framework includes a wide range of collaborative principles or strategies. A synthesis of the research on IPD can provide a better understanding of the variety of practices and dimensions...

Competitive Dialogue (CD) and Best Value Procurement (BVP) are two different approaches to early contractor involvement (ECI) in public projects. However, it is not clear which approach is best suited for what kind of project situations, and which is better for implementing lean in public procurement. The purpose of this paper is to explore the sim...

Glenn Ballard ist einer der Größen in der Lean Construction Bewegung und hat in seiner langjährigen Erfahrung im Bauwesen zahlreiche Projekte beratend begleitet. Er hat das Last Planner System® ursprünglich konzipiert und weltweit bekannt gemacht. In diesem Kapitel erklärt Ballard die Funktionsweise des Last Planner Systems® und die Vorteile als Ko...

Some evidence exists that lean projects are safer, but we don’t understand why. Providing an explanation is one of the objectives of the Construction Safety Research Group formed by the Project Production Systems Laboratory (P2SL). In this paper, we describe the research program of the group and its findings in year one of three, including an expla...

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to identify how the newly emerging UK practice of “Collaborative Planning” (CP) for construction project delivery aligns with the advocated principles of the Last Planner System (LPS) of production planning and control. Design/methodology/approach – A mixed, qualitative, exploratory approach was adopted for th...

Advanced Work Packaging (AWP) refers to an approach for planning the delivery of capital projects that aims to maximize productivity at the work face by aligning the deliverables of engineering design with what is needed in construction. The term Advanced Work Packaging was coined only a few years ago, and industry implementation to date appears to...

The lean ideal is to deliver customer value without waste. Traditional sustainability outcomes, which are attributed to the pursuit of the lean ideal in construction projects, consisted of economic outcomes instead of environmental outcomes. This paper explores how lean design methods can reduce construction and demolition and C & D waste and contr...

The lean ideal is to deliver customer value without waste. Traditional sustainability outcomes, which are attributed to the pursuit of the lean ideal in construction projects, consisted of economic outcomes instead of environmental outcomes. This paper explores how lean design methods can reduce construction and demolition (C&D) waste and contribut...

The lean ideal is to deliver customer value without waste. Traditional sustainability outcomes, which are attributed to the pursuit of the lean ideal in construction projects, consisted of economic outcomes instead of environmental outcomes. This paper explores how lean design methods can reduce construction and demolition (C&D) waste and contribut...

Target Value Design (TVD) has shown positive results on schedule, budget and products’ delivery with higher benefits for the owner. Familiarity with basic requirements of its elements and collaborative business practices have been hallmarks of successful TVD adoptions, particularly in healthcare. However, there has been little discussion about the...

Target Value Design (TVD) has shown positive results on schedule, budget and products’ delivery with higher benefits for the owner. Familiarity with basic requirements of its elements and collaborative business practices have been hallmarks of successful TVD adoptions, particularly in healthcare. However, there has been little discussion about the...

Target Value Design (TVD) has shown positive results on schedule, budget and products' delivery with higher benefits for the owner. Familiarity with basic requirements of its elements and collaborative business practices have been hallmarks of successful TVD adoptions, particularly in healthcare. However, there has been little discussion about the...

The purpose of this article is to understand the academic landscape on collaboration in design, its characteristics and related concepts for promoting collaboration within in the project based production systems. We aim to answer to the following three questions: How to define collaboration in design and why individuals need to collaborate during d...

Target Value Design (TVD) is a management practice that steers the design and construction of the project to the customer’s constraints while maximizing the value delivered within those constraints. TVD practice has been mostly pursued in private projects on which the client and key members of the project team all sign one multi-party contract. The...

Choosing a building system is not an easy task, especially when designers are concerned about the social and environmental impacts of their choices, as in the case of a net zero energy (NZE) building. In addition, economic constraints are commonly misunderstood so that all too often decisions are based on what is cheaper upfront and do not take the...

Design teams must make numerous decisions in building design, including choosing materials. Lately, they have become more concerned about the social and environmental effects of their choices, in addition to the economic constraints. These concerns, in addition to the increasing offerings of construction materials and products and the engagement of...

Latin America and the Caribbean are experiencing a severe housing shortage. The construction industry plays a pivotal role in housing provision and must find means to increase output and productivity in housing construction. However, inefficient production techniques, commonly associated with the building industry, exacerbate the problem. Adopting...

The Last Planner System (LPS) and Location-Based Management System (LBMS) are both lean planning and controlling tools. A combination of these systems would bring much greater benefits than stand-alone implementations. However, previous research attempting to combine these methods has not been on sufficient level of detail for actual implementation...

Overcoming the financial barriers to energy-efficiency (EE) investments requires efforts to explicitly evaluate energy-related risks during the commercial loan underwriting. To support such efforts, the objective of this paper is to suggest a novel target-setting practice that borrowers and lenders collaboratively can use during the early stages of...

Construction planning takes place at many levels. This paper pertains to the level called lookahead planning, during which planners make their plan more realistic as construction tasks approach execution. To improve the quality of lookahead planning, the construction industry has benefited from implementing the Last Planner® System (LPS) that empha...

Question: How to make shared risk and reward sustainable? Purpose: To bring to the attention of the construction community the risk that shared risk and reward approaches to project delivery are themselves at risk, and to promote practices that assure its sustainability. Research Method: Case study of a ‘failed’ shared risk and reward project by ac...

Multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) methods can help designers address the choosing problem in building detailed design. Many, however, appear to assume that all methods are equivalent. This paper argues that differences between MCDM methods matter. The first contribution of this paper is differentiating between the analytical hierarchy process (A...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to show that project success is dependent on the project management approach selected, relative to the challenges posed by the project, and to develop an analytical model for analyzing the performance of the project organization. Design/methodology/approach – The research is based on literature review, model...

Planning is often seen as an entirely technical process, but planning processes fail from competing interests and lack of collaboration. Well designed planning processes are social as well as technical. Reliable promising is the social glue, but you can't make a promise if you can't say "no" to a request. Today I am presenting the Last Planner syst...

Extensive research and published material exists addressing owner, contractor, and supplier relationships and contracting methods. Also, there exist a variety of capital project delivery systems in construction industry, which all aim at delivering projects to project owners with desired quality and within expected cost and schedule. These project...

For many years, lean production has been successfully applied in large companies producing high volumes of standardized products. However, companies which operate in dissimilar environments have yet to expose a suitable model for pursuing the lean ideal, adapted and fine-tuned to the diverse characteristics demonstrated by producers of, for example...

With the increased interest in applying integrated forms of project delivery to complex and uncertain construction projects, the building industry has been experiencing an increased demand for integrated project delivery (IPD). With the trend, many empirical studies have examined the collaborative characteristics of IPD and reported that participan...

Teams engaged in building design are composed of multiple stakeholders, including architects, owners, engineers, and sometimes users. Members of the design team often have different and conflicting interests, especially when considering sustainability issues. For example, issues may include reducing embodied energy while creating an earthquake resi...

This study was motivated by the need to implement lean construction in a concrete division recently established by a general contracting firm that has been an advocate of lean for several years. After observing difficulties to implement lean in the first project undertaken by this concrete division, the research team decided to adopt an alternative...

Developing energy-efficient commercial buildings requires the use of an energy-related risk management practice that can increase the chance of achieving intended lifecycle financial goals. This paper suggests a management practice that deals with such energy-related risk, namely, project cost risk and performance risk. A prerequisite to applying t...

Decisions in the architecture, engineering and construction industry need to be supported by decision-making methods. Choosing By Advantages (CBA) offers methods that support the creation of transparency and collaborative environments in which to make decisions. This paper provides an example of how CBA can be of support when choosing materials, in...

A slightly earlier version of this paper appeared as Appendix A in Eynon, John 2013 The Design Manager's Handbook (CIOB Wiley-Blackwell) pp165-190. A shorter version appeared in the CIOB's Construction Research and Information magazine in 2011. Abstract Purpose: To review the state-of-the-art of Lean Project Delivery (LPD), to show the relationsh...

Target Costing (TC) has been used in the manufacturing industry as a means of managing product profitability during the product development process. Efforts to adapt the TC manufacturing approach to the construction industry resulted in a management approach called Target Value Design (TVD). So far TVD research and practice are linked and limited t...

The relationship between rhetoric and design has been the subject of numerous scholarly publications in the last fifty years, but has not been addressed by scholars of engineering design. This paper argues that the relationship is important for theory and practice of design in all its varieties, principally by providing evidence from the literature...

Since the 1960's, there have been many initiatives for promoting theoretical understanding on design. However, in spite of definite progress, there are several puzzles and anomalies in the current theoretical landscape of design. We present an interpretation of the evolution of design theorizing that throws new light on these puzzles and anomalies....

This paper reports some early findings related to supplier development: the result of prequalification, performance evaluation and supplier development from 5 pilot regions in 3 countries. It is a follow-up to an IGLC paper presented in 2011. Supplier development can be seen as a third option when make or buy options do not lead to desired results....

This research was motivated by the identification of a practical problem with theoretical relevance. Empirical observation of a large infrastructure programme pointed out managerial difficulties to achieve the expected outcomes of that construction project. The observed problem is related to the challenge of collectively defining and pursuing a pro...

In an earlier paper, the first author argued that project budgets should be set based on the worth to the client of the asset to be designed and constructed, adjusted as needed for capital availability. However, cost estimates also play a role in the process of feasibility assessment and budgeting. When the client's allowable cost, what they are wi...

It is contended that the root cause for disagreement between lean construction proponents and management scholars is related to the new direction of management research which was proposed in 1959 in two influential books, by R.A. Gordon and J.E. Howell and by F.C. Pierson. It was argued that management was to be approached through three root stems:...

Market- and customer-oriented activities represent a major resource investment for a firm. Activity-based costing (ABC) provides an enhanced means for marketers to assess the cost-versus-benefits of such activities. This article describes the usefulness of ABC to marketers at various levels of decision making: unit level, product level, channel lev...

Researchers and practitioners in the Architectural, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry have been incorporating sustainability (environmental, social, and economic) aspects into decision-making, e.g., designers have selected materials with sustainability in mind. Many have used multi-criteria decision-making methods, appearing to assume th...

There is a need for greater understanding of the health impact of various design elements in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) as well as cost-benefit information to make informed decisions about the long-term value of design decisions. This is particularly evident when design teams are considering the transition from open-bay NICUs to single-f...

Our experience in engineering education and practice indicates that methodologies for architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) design management are characterized only to a limited extent. In domains other than AEC such methodologies are well-established and contribute to improving design performance. A step towards advancing AEC design ma...

This paper reviews the principles, history, applications and current research issues associated with lean construction, in order to provide a foundation for future research in this area. Lean is a management approach that emerged in the automobile industry and spread initially to other forms of repetitive manufacturing and ultimately to service ind...

Commercial loan underwriting for energy retrofits involves analyzing benefits and risks of energy efficiency (EE) improvement investments. We learned from interviews that current practices in commercial underwriting do not promote detailed collaboration between lenders and borrowers, and consequently erect financial barriers to making such investme...

Target value design (TVD) is a management method for integrated project delivery (IPD) through the collaborative efforts among different stakeholders. This study uses game theory to explain how TVD fundamentally enables each stakeholder to collaborate on initial design alignment. According to the prisoner's dilemma, two people locked in separate ja...

Target costing is an effective management technique that has been used in manufacturing for decades to achieve cost predictability during new product development. Adoption of this technique promises benefits for the construction industry as it struggles to raise the number of successful outcomes and certainty of project delivery in terms of cost, q...

Research Question: How to improve lookahead planning practices in the construction industry to increase the reliability of production planning? Purpose: To assess the performance of lookahead planning, advise a standardized practice to support a strong linkage between Lookahead planning and activity execution, and improve the reliability of product...

When deciding what alternative is more sustainable than others (i.e., selecting materials while considering environmental-, social-, and economic outputs) in the AEC industry, stakeholders need to select a method for their decision-making process. From the literature it appears to be assumed that all multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDA) metho...

Past research has found many drawbacks in the conventional approaches to managing projects. Among the criticisms is the traditional understanding of value generation primarily focused on product creation, while the industry struggles to meet the expectations of different groups of stakeholders about the benefits that these projects are supposed to...

Schedule for Sale: Workface Planning for Construction Projects, was published in 2009 by Geoff Ryan3. The idea behind the title is that productivity can be improved through better management, and that poor productivity causes projects to have longer durations. The book proposes a method of production planning and control designed specifically for m...

Research Questions: 1) Does the use of Last Planner (LP) improve project performance? 2) Does Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) show different project performance? 3) Do IPD projects use LP? Purpose: The first objective is to figure out the relationship between IPD, LP, and project performance. Research Method: survey of ‘Lean’ projects known to ad...

The University of California, Berkeley’s Project Production Systems Laboratory periodically publishes a description of the current benchmark in each project management process that is a subject of research. This reports on the current benchmark in Target Value Design (TVD), a revision of the original benchmark published in November, 20052. The firs...

Applicability of lean principles to construction might seem to require that construction's differentiating characteristics be softened or explained away. This is the strategy employed by those who advocate making construction more like the manufacturing from which lean thinking originated. Following that line of thought, successive waves of impleme...

Different types of flow variation and how they affect construction project performance have been studied by previous researchers. One aspect that has not been well researched is how work flow variation and labor productivity are related in construction practice. To study that issue, 134 weeks of project production data were collected and analyzed t...

Purpose Target costing determines the cost of a building before design. The cost of the product is based on the customer's requirements for the product's performance and the customer's willingness to pay for such performance. However, if the designers cannot achieve the target cost, the benefits of target costing are wasted. The purpose of this pap...

Selecting a project delivery system is widely understood to be part of the project definition phase. That selection is made from a finite set of alternative contract and phase structures; e.g., design-bid-build or design-build. In this paper, we explore two alternatives to the received wisdom; namely, 1) project delivery systems are products of des...

This paper discusses contemporary strategies for managing and visualizing the building design process, and the link between a project organization, its tools, and the resulting product. The convergence of building information modeling software, analysis tools, and drawing production software has improved the integration of architecture and engineer...

One of the trends in construction today is the increasing use of specialty contractors. As a result, projects are becoming more complicated and fragmented, more coordination is required, and overhead costs of the general contractors are increasing relative to the direct costs. Better ways of controlling job-site overhead costs are needed. This pape...