Todd Zabelle

• Consultant at Project Production Institute

To meet the demand for infrastructure created by digital transformation, energy transition, and the need for commercial and residential space, owners and their contractors continue to move work offsite in an attempt to reduce the duration of site construction by increasing the amount of parallel offsite work. At the same time, from hospital modules...

Current project management practice focuses primarily on what to build (scope), when to build (dates) and who will do the work. Schedules depicting what work needs to be done by whom, and when it needs to be done, establish overall expectations (what should / want to happen) and are used as the basis for reporting and forecasting of project progres...

Many people view managing projects and managing production systems as completely distinct. Mark L. Spearman, H. James Choo, and Todd R. Zabelle describe how large capital construction projects include production operations and how to apply operations science to make these activities more effective. The result is that these important and challenging...

Ongoing analysis of efficiency in construction compared to other industries indicates construction continues to fall further behind. There are several reasons for this, but one that is most prevalent is the difference in approach to design and engineering between advanced industries such as aerospace, automotive, etc. and the construction industry....

The 2018 PPI Symposium incorporated significant discussion about the role of digital technology including artificial intelligence, machine learning, IoT sensor and autonomous in support of Project Production Management (PPM) as the means to achieve better project outcomes. Though the relationship is obvious for many, the connection is not apparent...

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...

Value Stream Mapping (VSM) is a term that describes a family of popular techniques used to analyze production systems. Popularized in the 1980s by Womack and Jones [1] and the Lean movement, VSM is a staple tool associated with lean practitioners. Modern day practice of VSM, heavily influenced by the book by Rother and Shook [2], is to map a curren...

A significant gap exists around how to manage work at the frontline, or the point of installation. The inability to effectively manage execution of work is a key reason projects continue to suffer from cost and schedule overruns along with the associated claims. The Institute’s principals have come to this conclusion through conversations with nume...

The ever-increasing lead time for products (including materials and permanent equipment) required to deliver a capital project results in increased project delivery costs and operating costs for owners, not to mention the associated loss of revenue and related lost opportunity cost. This paper outlines the cost of long lead time and provides the r...

Project management can be viewed as having developed over 3 distinct time frames, or Eras, in response to the evolving nature and needs of projects over time. Viewing project management through the framework of the 3 Eras provides a number of useful insights described in this article. Conventional project management, as codified by the Project Mana...

Project management can be viewed as having developed over 3 distinct time frames, or Eras, in response to the evolving nature and needs of projects over time. Viewing project management through the framework of the 3 Eras provides a number of useful insights described in this article. Conventional project management, as codified by the Project Mana...

Fabrication is a vital part of the extended production system for a construction project. As shop fabrication is a type of manufacturing and 'lean thinking' arose in manufacturing, use of lean concepts and techniques in the management of fabrication processes would seem to be a natural and beneficial application. Fabrication can be divided into pre...

Guidelines are proposed for the design of production systems, which are understood to involve both designing and making products. Production system design serves the three goals of production systems: do the job, maximize value, and minimize waste. For each of the latter two, ends-means hierarchies are proposed that progressively answer the questio...

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 construction techniques. A week prior to conducting...

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...

Guidelines are proposed for the design of production systems, which are understood to involve both designing and making products. Production system design serves the three goals of production systems: do the job, maximize value, and minimize waste. For each of the latter two, ends-means hierarchies are proposed that progressively answer the questio...

Time-space conflicts are one of the major causes of productivity losses at construction sites, and they are preventable and manageable if identified prior to construction. Current industry practice and project management tools and techniques do not support proactive time-space conflict management. Our research focuses on formalizing and automating...

Implementing lean means an organization (project or enterprise) transforms itself from a current state to a future state vision that incorporates a lean ideal. This paper proposes a strategy for organizations to increase the likelihood of success when going through a lean transformation. This approach considers construction projects as the basis fo...

Introduction The superiority of pull-based production systems over traditional batch and queue (mass) is evident and resulting in the transformation of several industries. In White Paper-1 we presented the benefits of pull-based production for AEC projects. In that paper we proposed that in order to use pull-based systems on AEC projects, a window...