← Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
The DOWNTIME Strategy—Eliminating Waste Before Adding Process | Felipe Engineer-Manriquez
00:15:33
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- [00:04]
A
Hey there, agile adventurer, just a quick question. What if for the price of a fancy coffee or half a pizza, you could unlock over 700 hours of the best agile content on the planet? That's audio, video, E courses, books, presentations, all that you can think of. But you can also join live calls with world class practitioners and hang out in a flame war free and AI slop clean slack with the sharpest minds in the game. Oh, and yes, you get direct access to me, Vasko, your Scrum Master Toolbox podcast. No, this is not a drill. It's this Scrum Master Toolbox membership and it's your unfair advantage in the agile world. So if you want to know more, go check out scrummastertoolbox.org membership. That's scrummastertoolbox.org Membership. And check out all the goodies we have for you. Do it now. But if you're not doing it now, let's listen to the podcast.
- [01:12]
B
Hello everybody. Welcome to our week with Felipe Engineer Manriquez. Hey Felipe, welcome back.
- [01:18]
C
Hey Vasco, it's good to be back with Felipe.
- [01:21]
B
We're talking about agile in construction. Well, I should say that it's agile and lean in construction. You'll see why in a second. But today's the change day here on the podcast and we want to look at how you specifically bring lean, lean and agile methods into a construction project or organization. So share with us. Olipe, what's your change strategy?
- [01:43]
C
Yeah, my first strategy, and this is I tell this explicitly to teams. I borrow from Hippocrates, who is famous, one of the early healers in ancient human history and he's famous for the Hippocratic oath. And I tell teams the first, my first rule is that I will do no harm by working with me in these different methods. I promise you that I will do no harm and if something goes wrong, I will take full responsibility with leadership and I'll put my neck on. My neck is literally on the line and I use, depending on my, my audience. Bosco, I'll use much more colorful language with so that, so that it is clear that I'm not just like a seagull coming in, shitting on people and making people telling people they're doing things wrong and that we're going to do things completely differently. That is not the approach. My biggest challenge is to get people to disrupt the patterns that they're currently using and to do something different. And so I come at it systematically with do no harm first. And there's always obvious things where people are Doing wasteful things that don't add value to the goals that they're trying to achieve. And so some of the first things I do to implement these new strategies is to help the team let things go, stop doing things. Every single project team in lean, we learn about waste and even like it's obsessively too much. And the. In industrial engineering practices, we learned there's three major causes of all wastes. There's variation, overburden, and then the. And then what? Everybody just knows the eight wastes or the seven waste, depending on who you learn it from. But there's typically eight wastes. And we use the acronym downtime, Defects, overproduction, waiting, transportation, inventory, motion processing. It's an acronym downtime. Those different categories all represent not providing value. And then the construction industry downtime represents something like a burn of 60 to 80% of every dollar does not add value from the customer's perspective, which is horrible. Where other industries like. And I'll say on average in, in construction, that percentage that we deliver as value is around 30, 15 to 20%. So from just an easy math perspective, for every dollar spent, only 15 to 20 cents of value reaches the owner and the stakeholders downstream and the rest is burned up in the system of producing the thing. And it's crazy bad. Whereas like in, in, in manufacturing, it's, it's more, it's above 50% of value that reaches like so more than 50 cents. In agriculture, it's like the opposite. 90 cents of every dollar spent translates into getting you food. In agriculture, it's very efficient. Our industry is like terribly inefficient. So my approach is to stop doing things. There's these eight major categories that we can stop doing and as we stop doing those things, it creates excess capacity for the teams. And it's only then when we're in this excess capacity mode that we all introduce new processes.
- [04:51]
B
So tell me a little bit more before we go into the new process and how you introduce those. What are some of the typical things that you find, find free up that access capacity. Like a couple of examples just to make it concrete for the audience.
- [05:06]
C
Yeah. One is big batch processing. People like to wait to do things. So like, and we laugh about this all the time, like, well, even something as simple as making a commitment on an action item in a meeting, the default answer in construction, and anyone who's listening to this that has any type of experience in construction, this will immediately trigger them. If somebody's asked to make a commitment, the default answer is within two weeks. Everybody always answers within two weeks. And so when you hear that and like, we'll look at like, what does it actually take? And you deconstruct that. And so the waste associated with the in two weeks answer is waiting. Waiting is the waste that's in play. But the subtle thing that's happening is big batch processing and multitasking. People are doing a lot of things and they're finishing nothing. And so when they make these commitments, they're hedging their bet because they know that they have these other things distracting them that they have to get done. But they, they don't want to not please another human being, so they want to be polite and they'll say two weeks. Now, nothing in the world that I know of, no natural human process actually takes 14 calendar days to do. But it is the number one answer that people make. And so when you, when you pick apart what it actually is, then you can, you can reduce the batch size of something more appropriate and get a much better answer. It's never 14 days. Maybe it's 13, but it's not 14. And so like that waiting is terrible. That, and that's, that's a huge thing. I want to teach people the downtime. Maybe I play like a short little video that comes from software development. And the, it's hilarious because all the examples of the video, it's a video from a software company called Orbus and it's the eight wastes of Lean. And it's an amazing video that shows the downtime in like, it's like a three minute video. But once people see the eight wastes and all on like, I feel like every example is a construction example in their software video. It's hilarious. You can't not see it. And that's what you're going to use to implement. You're going to use that to, you decrease the waste and then you create the capacity to do the changes. And so I, so I survey people. The number one answer when I say what's what waste is affecting you. Waiting is number one. It doesn't matter if I'm talking to a design engineers, architects, or if I'm talking to Foreman or anybody in any trade. Waiting is the number one thing.
- [07:35]
B
That's what the system produces. Right? Waiting.
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C
Exactly. Waiting. Because the whip is too high. The whip is the work in process is too high. The higher the work in process, the less throughput your system will give you. So the waiting becomes exponentially longer and unnecessary.
- [07:50]
B
So you've freed up the capacity. What do you do next?
- [07:53]
C
Yeah. Then that's the first thing I do is I make things transparent, make things visible, increase transparency. Step one. So like I worked with, there was a team I work with that was working on a job. This is the classic every day you work, they lose a day. This job already had lawyers engaged. They're going to claim, they're going to litigate and they're going to litigate against the city. This was the city project. They're making an ambulatory emergency response center. You call 911 in the city and this building answers the call and deploys emergency resources and other things. And, and it was. They'd worked two years and they still had another. It was like a, supposed to be a one year project. It was two years later, not done. And, and I go to the team and this is a class like all the classic patterns are in place. And the, the team was convinced that the people they hired to do the project were incompetent. And so the biggest challenge there was.
- [08:47]
B
That's an easy one to believe, right? Given that it was a two year, a one year project that had lasted already two years and I had one.
- [08:53]
C
More year to finish. So it was like it needed, it needed from the time they realized that they were getting lawyers involved, it was going to take two years to finish. And so we implemented a simple thing. We made visible the next milestone goal that the team was going to achieve, which if the case was like, it was like some, some putting up some priority walls in the building. And these were like drywall walls, like drywall paint. And so we just made that visible. We spent five, five minutes in the meeting describing what it means for these walls to be finished on a whiteboard. And I hand wrote the date and I put it on the wall. And I told the superintendent, like in, in Europe they have. These are site managers. Superintendent. Same in the United States, Superintendent. And I said, just put this on the wall and if people ask you, just answer the questions, leave the answers there. We answered it as a group with the other lead foreman from the meeting and five minute meeting. What happened was two weeks later they met their schedule and improved the schedule by four days. And the superintendent said, never in the entire time I worked here have we ever met a schedule commitment or did better. So it was the first time ever. And the only thing we did was we spent five minutes. Now what that thing I was actually doing with them was planning. We were planning and we were defining where a future condition where we wanted to be.
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B
But it was like real time planning always Adjusting to the reality of that moment.
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C
Yeah. And to make that change happen, to even get to the point where I can stand with this team and have this five minute conversation, I had to bribe them with pizza. I bought the team pizza. And it wasn't like I didn't pay amount of money like the company let me reimburse, but we fed people. And in the time that they were eating, that's when we did the five minute conversation, defining what it was. And they made the time up.
- [10:49]
B
Yeah. And I really like that approach of, okay, first free up capacity. Because otherwise you're always going to increase the pressure and it's only going to make things worse and then make things visible. Trust that people know what to do, and they usually do. If you make the things visible. And that five minute meeting that you just discussed, I don't know if that's what you thought when you did that, but did you introduce that as kind of an analog to the daily scrum?
- [11:18]
C
Yeah, that team was. They weren't doing a daily. They weren't doing a daily huddle. Like, in construction, it's very common for teams to do these daily huddles usually for safety reasons. There's like a lot of like, legal reasons why they have to review these things that they're going to do. And a lot of projects hijack that safety meeting and make it a production meeting where they're pushing dates on people. So that. That was happening on that project, but they were not actually planning. They were just pushing. They're. They're using those meetings to push. And I had. I was observing the team and I realized, like, I don't think people are clear on what needs to be done. So we didn't get to the point where we had to do the daily. Just making the. The dates visible and letting them input that pattern first. I told them, like, in a future state, like, there's a couple more things we're going to do. In reality, it's like 25 more things I wanted them to do, but I was like, I just keep it simple. Like it's going to be a couple more changes. And what ends up happening, Vasco, is that we make these changes, we stabilize, and then we introduce the next change because the capacity changes again. And we're using. We're back to theory constraints. I think we talked about like on Tuesday, where your system, as it stabilizes and you make a change to a bottleneck, the whole system changes again. You have to find a different bottleneck will emerge.
- [12:33]
B
Exactly, exactly. That's so. Well expressed like, don't try to do all of the things at the same time, because when you do one thing, the system changes.
- [12:43]
C
Yeah. And once it stabilized and we saw that that was an issue, the next thing to change was to put a focus on getting people paid. The change orders were a problem. That was the next big thing to change that that released so the team could actually get paid for work that they had done because the design was ever evolving.
- [13:02]
B
Yeah, absolutely. I really like that change approach and I'm sure we can learn a lot from that also in the software side. So thank you very much for sharing that with us, Felipe.
- [13:12]
C
Yeah, you're welcome.
- [13:17]
A
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- [15:09]
B
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