 Reforming Project Management |
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Saturday, January 10, 2004
Update to Web Design
Hello folks, I've been tinkering with the design to offer more, yet have it be more readable. People complained they couldn't adjust text size. I've made changes so View|Text Size now works. I've added a right-hand column and uncluttered some of the rest of the page. I removed Waypath It! The results were way too bizarrre. I've also added a Safety Everyday page with navigation at the top along with the others. On that page you'll find a sideblog in the right-hand column of current Construction Safety stories in the news. Most are culled from Google News Alerts, but some have come from readers. Send me your links. Hope you like it! Friday, January 09, 2004
Learn about Lean Construction in Atlanta
Lean Construction Institute will present the seminar, "Introduction to Lean Construction", in Atlanta on February 12-13, 2004. For more information, see http://www.conted.vt.edu/introlean/. The seminar will be followed by the LCI Academic Forum on the February 14, 2004. For more information, see
http://www.conted.vt.edu/introlean/forum.html. This session is open to all educators. Thursday, January 08, 2004
Lost Time Falls by 87% in 2003
They designed a system that is coherent. The interests of the individuals are in alignment with the interests of the company and the customers. They are careful what they measure. They tie rewards directly to the behavior they want. They made safety a team sport.
In the conversation we wondered together if their approach will continue to produce improvements in the safety record. Another 87% reduction seems too much to hope for. They are still not satisfied where they are. They seem intent on making another significant reduction. In the words of the head of operations, "Safety is our way of life." My take: Wednesday, January 07, 2004
Waypath What?
Waypath It! I've added a link at the end of every posting that will take you to similar postings by other bloggers. That's the claim anyway from Waypath. The people at Think Tank 23 created the Waypath service for searching only weblog postings. It does that by first looking at my posting. (Imagine trying to make sense out of that!) Using the context of the current posting it finds what others have been writing. This is similar to the way the Google It! link works except the Google search is based just on the title of the posting. (My titles often make even less sense!) The Google It! search is also more general searching anywhere on the Internet. Try Waypath It! and let me know what you think. Struggle to Get Lean at ArvinMeritor
Fortune Magazine has a great story of ArvinMeritor's efforts at staying competitive by adopting a lean approach to manufacturing. Unfortunately, Fortune doesn't make their stories available online except to subscribers. (Fortune does allow subscribers to send articles to their friends. Go figure! Maybe I can figure send you a copy without violating my subscriber agreement. Check back here.) Here's the story The Struggle to Get Lean for subscribers. There are three issues that matter to those of us doing projects.
The methods and implementation approaches are different in a factory from a project. The issues are generally the same. We must take the waste out of our projects. The principles for doing so are well-documented. If you haven't read Lean Thinking you owe it to yourself to do so now. And if you haven't done so already, then sign-up for the teleconference series. Don't miss the opportunity to spend time with Norman Bodek in February and Jim Womack in May to talk about lean. Tuesday, January 06, 2004
Get on the List
I first met Jim about six years ago. He joined us as a speaker at The Neenan Company's annual conference on the issues that would shape the construction industry. As you might imagine, construction guys didn't think they had much to learn from a car guy, particularly one who talked about Toyota. But the times they have changed. Now every industry wants to learn about lean thinking. This should be a memorable session. Check out the description of the event and sign-up. There's no charge! When you have a minute, check out Jim Womack's Lean Enterprise Institute. Sunday, January 04, 2004
Sign-Up for the Teleconference Series
It's a new year and a bunch of new initiatives. I've been writing about the teleconference series with authors of books. We've lined up 6 great authors. The latest is Jim Womack, co-author of The Machine that Changed the World and Lean Thinking. You don't want to miss it. Visit the description of the series and sign-up for notification of each teleconference. The first teleconference with David Schmaltz is January 22nd. Don't miss it! Overwhelmed by Safety Info
I was preparing for my Safety Thursday's posting over the weekend. I Googled "construction safety" and got 103,000 listings. As I worked my way through the first 150 listings I became overwhelmed. There's so much information, yet there has been so little progress. Why? I won't answer that here. I can say that there are numerous companies with very good safety records. I'll be trying to contact them and interview them for the series. If you know of a company who has either a consistent pattern of improving safety performance or an EMR of less than 0.40, then please let me know either with a comment to this posting or an email hal@halmacomber.com. Visit the Archives for more postings |
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