Time- and battle-tested, lean manufacturing principles have been a staple of the industrial factory for decades, so significantly that productivity-starved construction companies have been borrowing a page from that playbook (we’ll get more into that below). But as to “agile,” that’s a relatively new term.
Best known to be practiced among the tech-focused startups of Silicon Valley, the methodology behind agile software development or agile project management may seem alien to the construction trades—just about as unfamiliar in concept as the practitioners of them may seem inaccessibly geographically distanced. But in fact, the principles they’re built on are fundamentally comparable and applicable to construction companies looking to increase their productivity despite facing organizational challenges (namely, growing construction labor shortages).
In this article, thus, we’ll cover a few important considerations:
The word “lean” might bring to mind prominent martial artist Bruce Lee, who unlike traditional body builders and Mr. Olympia honorees who bulk up, practiced a different kind of strength training, becoming as a result physically strong but not bulky and unwieldy.
Similarly, lean thinking is rooted in purpose-driven principles, to create strength through a unified focus and an inextricably linked production system designed to maximize efficiency and productivity toward delivering on that focus.
Lean thinking (see: “A Brief History of Lean” published by the Lean Enterprise Institute) can be traced back to the automobile manufacturing industry of the 1930s. Debatably, Henry Ford was the first person to adopt an exhaustive production process, able to turn around inventory in mere days. Ford’s Achilles heel in those early days was not flow but limited variety. Though high output/quantity of the same product was doable, introducing variations (new models, different colors, etc.) hadn’t yet been mastered.
Enter: Kiichiro Toyoda (founder of Toyota Motor Co). Toyoda, whose family had roots in the textile industry, had a passion for machines, and developed looms to help make weaving garments more streamlined through automation. Toyoda realized that revising Ford’s system with a couple important innovations (shifting the focus of a manufacturing engineer from individual machines to the flow of the product through the entire process) could result in something magical and seemingly out of reach becoming feasible: “low cost, high variety, high quality, and very rapid throughput times to respond to changing customer desires.”
Today, with the advent of digitization, Deloitte estimates lean technologies can reduce annual costs by 15% and improve overall equipment effectiveness by 11%.
It all starts with generally 5 principles of lean manufacturing:
Studies have shown the construction industry to represent “large amount of waste activities,” much higher than typically experienced at a manufacturing plant:
Any one or combination of these could result in a costly project overrun, but that’s where the lean principles we discussed above come in.
Lean construction, as defined by the Lean Construction Institute, “extends from the objectives of a Lean production system—maximize value and minimize waste—to specific techniques, and applies them in a new project delivery process.”
At the core of this philosophy is the customer. Lean aims to precisely identify, target, and deliver on customer value while streamlining workflows and processes in order to maximize productivity.
To start, establishing a high-trust culture is mission critical to understanding customer needs and determining expectations. Leading with transparency, and fostering collaboration, can help assure miscommunication, and expensive rework, is averted.
From here, what are some techniques that can be applied to your delivery system (it’s all about optimizing flow!) in service of prioritizing customer value?
There’s a reason that the agile methodology is so common in software development among Silicon Valley tech startups. Ever meet anyone who has worked for a startup? The common trope: underpaid, overworked, compensated in stock options.
These hard-pressed engineers need to set priorities and create efficiencies in order to deliver valuable features while not getting bogged down in the backlog.
In traditional software development, the process looks similar to that of a waterfall. In a waterfall, stream or river water flows over a vertical drop. Once you fall over the edge, there’s no turning back as you plunge downward.
Similarly, waterfall software development is a linear approach that follows a sequence of events: requirements are gathered, design commences, designs are coded and tested, any bugs that are found are squashed, and then finally the finished product (software update) is deployed. Each of these events represents a distinct stage, with each new stage finishing before the next stage can begin.
Similar to the “waste activities” we discussed above of experienced in the construction industry, the waterfall model in app development invites plenty of room for inefficiency—as a framework with excessive rigidity, limited flexibility, it makes addressing customer concerns and last-minute requests challenging.
Agile, meanwhile, is an iterative, team-based approach to software development that emphasizes rapid delivery of functional products in a short period of time (known as sprints). Like the lean manufacturing principles—namely, Kaizen (continuous improvement)—subsequent batches are planned in cyclical schedules.
Advantages of agile over waterfall:
On the One-Key team, we have the unique privilege working for a large power tool manufacturing company on a mobile- and web-based software application, which in a weird but awesome way is kind of like working for a small startup within the larger organization. As a result, we’re able to be exposed to lean manufacturing principles, rapid prototyping, and product development, while also developing our app within the agile framework.
With these considerations front of mind, there are some definite parallels between lean construction and agile software development we felt compelled to make:
I’ll leave you with two thoughts:
Focusing on these principles—delivering true value in place of non-value adds, and being able to quickly respond to change—is critical to your success. Echoing through these principles is the voice of the customer, their needs, and the values they seek, driving you to create and adapt, and earn more business while your laggard competitors fail to evolve.