LeanCPM vs Lean

Lean is a production management approach for construction, adapted from lean manufacturing.

The good

Lean is simple—no need for CPM theory.

Lean’s strengths stem from a bottom-up approach, allowing people closer to the work to control their destiny. Anyone can step up and identify issues and areas for improvement. Stand-up meetings allow synchronous communication in projects with many moving parts.

The bad

Lean is a total rejection of legacy CPM. It says legacy CPM is flawed because it’s managed in a silo, is asynchronous, and doesn’t reflect reality.

While that is all true, Lean Construction overlooks the primary purpose of CPM: to have a parametric schedule that can automatically adjust, that recognizes that if drywall is pushed up a week, then paint will too, and so will casework, ceiling grid, and the 10 other tasks that you can’t remember right now.

This flaw makes plans quickly useless once conditions change. Relationships are inferred, so every change requires reworking plans.

It ends up being more work (though simpler), just to deliver projects as late or later than projects that use legacy CPM.

The ugly

Construction differs greatly from manufacturing, on which Lean is based. While reducing DOWNTIME is valuable, finishing on time or early is often more critical.

For example, PPC (Planned Percent Complete) is the measure of how many tasks that were set out to be completed are completed, and doesn’t take into consideration high-priority work. In Lean, missing 20% is a good thing, even if the 20% were all critical activities.

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The difference

The idea behind LeanCPM is that it enables anyone to create a plan, too, albeit with a slightly different (but improved) interface. In the process, whether they know it or not, they’re also creating dependencies between tasks, making a logically sound plan.

LeanCPM is to CPM what Wix and Squarespace are to HTML/CSS. It’s not quite drawing boxes on a screen, but it’s close, and it’s responsive to different screen sizes, or in our case, different outcomes with task progress.