The End of Project Overruns: Lean and Beyond for Engineering, Procurement and Construction [Paperback]

Book Description

Publication Date: April 10, 2010 | ISBN-10: 1599428962 | ISBN-13: 978-1599428963

Applying the principles in this book unleashes ingenuity that achieves, solidifies and perpetuates a new performance culture of mutual benefit. In this culture, project teams will prepare their work in task packages and enable workflow necessary to leave inefficiency of time and resource, literally, no place to hide. Project examples will help teams implement the principles that shorten cycle times, eliminate error, improve quality and reduce costs to succeed in meeting project commitments. Emerging Lean enterprise relationships between clients, EPC contractors and their entire supply chain will advance what constitutes the new, market-differentiating performance of individuals, project teams and companies - justifying high levels of trust and inter-organizational efforts to improve. Client executives will learn to recognize root causes of risk and sources of excellence to mitigate them. Well-developed strategic improvement is often constrained because the traditional way - current means and methods - fit squarely in everyone's comfort zone. By learning to ask the right questions, top-client leadership will soon render overruns from the best traditional systems as "not-good enough" and strive for a new level of excellence. EPC executives will better engage creative voices from their best resources and stakeholders to resolve all concerns and define a unified vision for how to deliver on clients' expectations without overruns during capital project delivery. Lean methods will effectively assure that vision, principles and best expectations are understood and implemented at the workface. Department, discipline and stakeholder leaders will align and no longer frustrate each other and their clients. They will plan and execute with increased efficiency and effectiveness. Cost reduction will accelerate, retaining only client-valued quality - enabling a nimble response to market opportunities and threats. Project and program managers will confidently accept intense, market-induced cost and schedule-reduction efforts. They will apply new metrics, measure potential and extract, align and pilot improvements. They will make workface progress transparent to simplify resource balancing, full utilization and workface flow during all project phases. The results will differentiate team members and their project's performance on the world stage. Project professionals and the skilled labor force will gain confidence to make and keep increasingly difficult commitments and experience thereby increasing opportunity in an organization known for excellence. They will fully engage heart and mind for leaders who expect excellence and they trust to enable and reward best practice performance while they jointly eliminate root causes of problems before they happen. This book guides readers through each essential role for the transformation to Lean...not just at the lowest levels but of the entire business model and all the supporting processes. Resulting market recognition of sustained excellence of people, their systems and they way they work together will create a market-leading force.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Thick with insight and strategies July 9, 2010

By Aaron M Patty

Format:Paperback

This is not another book that only provides theory and rhetoric. This book walks you through the ins and outs of implementing lean principles at all levels of what we in the defense industry call non-recurring engineering (NRE), or engineering efforts that only occur once. Our projects typically cost a few thousand man hours. This book has examples from real-world projects with 3+ million man hours of NRE! This book takes you through all the ins and outs of how to apply the lean, six sigma, theory of constraints, and related genres to real world, enormous engineering efforts. The authors show how the principles that have made such drastic improvements in the manufacturing industries can easily, effectively, and properly be applied to engineering. This book is truly a first and best of its kind!

When starting a new software engineering department at my company I used this book as a guide and was able to make immediate improvements in our processes. This resulted in successfully deploying a brand new software test platform in less than two weeks of what is normally a 12 week cycle! My best guess is that we only implemented about 10% of what the authors suggested! Perhaps this was low-hanging fruit... but that's the point. This book showed us how to capture that fruit in a matter of a few hours, and save 83% of our schedule! But the book doesn't sell short-term solutions. It's all about institutionalizing these principles for long-term, sustainable success. And that's where it really excels, providing deep insights into human behavior, and providing metrics, principles, practices, and insights for making continuous process improvements on an ongoing basis. It doesn't read like a novel, but it's well worth your money and time. HIGHEST RECOMMENDATION POSSIBLE!!!