Hyun Jeong Choo

Strategic Project Solutions, Inc.

Herein we describe a refinement of the well-known Cycle Time Formula, introducing two new components into the formula. One component describes the “wait-to-match” time of different routings in a production system converging at a single point, such as in an assembly operation. The second component accounts for “planned time buffers” – the time that...

An article in a previous edition of this Journal outlined the evolution of project management over three distinct Eras. Eras 1 & 2 encapsulate conventional project management thinking, while Era 3 describes a Project Production Management framework that views projects as temporary production systems and applies Operations Science to optimize projec...

The first volume of the PPI Journal included a tutorial article on Little’s Law, explaining the fundamental relationship between throughput, cycle time and work-in-process (WIP) for all production systems, including those that are contained within capital projects. For those new to Operations Sciences, a more naïve interpretation of Little’s Law le...

The Product-Process Matrix, first proposed by Hayes and Wheelwright, is a fundamental concept in Operations Science. Products made in production systems vary in complexity, ranging from highly customized low volume products to commodity, standard high-volume products. The Product-Process Matrix describes how certain types of production processes ar...

In the previous edition of the Journal, we featured a tutorial article on Little’s Law, which is a fundamental relationship between Throughput (TH), Cycle Time (CT) and Work-In-Process (WIP). These core variables are found in all production systems, including those that are contained within capital projects. A naïve interpretation of Little’s Law f...

Since it was first published over 50 years ago, Little’s Law has been applied, with great success, to numerous fields such as telecommunications networks, retail supply chain management, logistics and manufacturing. But is it applicable to project delivery? If so, how can we benefit from its use? In the first of what is intended to be a series of s...

The primary purpose of this paper is to first define and then differentiate Project Controls and Project Production Control. The paper also provides a brief historical perspective and examples of the application of each discipline. The paper concludes that although the two disciplines are distinct, each plays a different and important role in Proje...

The iterative and information-intensive nature of the design process makes it hard to plan and schedule work using tools for conventional project management. The success of design projects depends on the quality of the available information. This paper proposes DePlan as a method for integrated design management during the detail design phase. DePl...

This paper describes a computing environment, called WorkMovePlan, that supports the exchange of data pertaining to resources shared between multiple production units and between multiple projects. It presents issues related to the generation and management of this data exchange and the development of a distributed, multi-project scheduling system...

The Last Planner methodology has been applied to construction and design. These efforts have resulted in the development of computer programs (WorkPlan and DePlan) that guide production units in creating reliable work plans. One of these programs was extended to include distributed planning and coordination and space scheduling capabilities as well...

The Last Planner methodology has been applied to construction and design. These efforts have resulted in the development of computer programs (WorkPlan and DePlan) that guide production units in creating reliable work plans. One of these programs was extended to include distributed planning and coordination and space scheduling capabilities as well...

The planning and management of building design has historically focused upon traditional methods of planning such as Critical Path Method (CPM). Little effort is made to understand the complexities of the design process; instead design managers focus on allocating work packages where the planned output is a set of deliverables. All too often there...

Planning during construction is a continuous and complex process that involves many participants because needed information is usually not found within one party but is spread out among parties. It truly is a distributed process. Nevertheless, few existing planning tools provide means to facilitate this process. This paper describes a representatio...

INTRODUCTION The Parade of Trades computer program simulates a dice game. The purpose of this game is to demonstrate the impact variability and dependence have in a construction environment where multiple trades follow each other in a linear sequence and work output by one trade is handed off to the next trade. The term "parade of trades" was coine...

WorkMovePlan combines the Last Planner methodology, implemented in the WorkPlan software, with space scheduling. This allows the Last Planner to not only specify labor and equipment but also space as an explicit resource. WorkPlan guides the user step by step to plan work for the week ahead through the process of spelling out work packages, identif...

A database program called WorkPlan has been created to systematically develop weekly work plans. Such work plans are used by crew foremen in scheduling work packages and allocating available labor and equipment resources. WorkPlan adopts the Last Planner methodology, which implements several lean con-struction techniques. A week prior to conducting...

A database program called WorkPlan has been created to systematically develop weekly work plans. WorkPlan adopts the Last Planner methodology, which implements several lean construction techniques. A week prior to conducting work, WorkPlan guides the user step by step through the process of spelling out work packages, identifying constraints, check...