The number of construction project managers initializing the use of the Last Planner System of Production Control (LPS), an operating system for project management designed to optimize work flow and promote rapid learning, is rapidly increasing, motivated by industry trends and testimonials of its perceived benefits. This study, limited to the building sector, is a systematic literature and testimonial search of the perceived motivations and benefits or challenges for choosing LPS. It substantiates the claims of those perceptions through a structured survey of senior and mid-level managers. Quantitative statistical tools infer that practitioners who use LPS experience more reliable planning, better supply chain integration, and less work flow time. However, managers who directly implement LPS are faced with external resistance from clients and subcontractors, and feel that their organization does not offer the necessary incentives for adopting LPS, indicating a possible clash of paradigms. The case studies and testimonials were available in the literature referenced in the paper, but the survey and the method for analysis are new and have not been published elsewhere, either wholly or in part.

The paper explores the role of design in systems engineering. It reviews the treatment of design in systems engineering in general and in the Systems Engineering Handbook in particular, and concludes that design is the missing dimension in systems engineering. It provides a review of salient viewpoints from research in design that can enhance the understanding of the design dimension in system engineering.complex problems and discusses how these theories might be incorporated into the handbook and other systems engineering guidance. Design-Related Concepts in Systems EngineeringSystems engineering practitioners and scholars chose different terms that cover overlapping concepts based on their background and perception. This is especially true for design-related vocabulary. This section discusses the more common terms related to design: systems engineering, systems analysis, systems architecting, and systems design.Systems Engineering (SE): Brill (1994) described the long debate on the definition of systems engineering as a "semantics jungle." One problem is that systems engineering has both a 'systematic ' and 'systemic' nature (Chestnut 1967). The systematic nature of systems engineering focuses on management processes, and the systemic nature focuses on design methods.Stupples (2006) believes that the systematic nature of systems engineering is the current face of the discipline. He states, "SE has sadly lost its science foundation and is being practiced widely as the application of management processes to systems design and hence information required for decision making under uncertainty is not being generated." Comparing earlier definitions of systems engineering with recent ones supports Stupples' assertion. One of the earlier definitions (Chase 1974) states that SE is "the process of selecting and synthesizing the application of the appropriate scientific and technical knowledge to translate system requirements into system design and subsequently to produce the composite of equipment, skills, and techniques that can be effectively employed as a coherent whole to achieve some stated goal or purpose." Here, as Rhodes and Hastings (2004) pointed out, the emphasis was on the translation of requirements for the design process.The coordinative and managerial view to SE has emerged in the past two decades as can be seen in two definitions of SE. First, INCOSE (Haskins 2011) defined SE as "an interdisciplinary approach and means to enable the realization of successful systems. It focuses on defining customer needs and required functionality early in the development cycle, documenting requirements, and then proceeding with design synthesis and system validation while considering the complete problem: operations, cost and schedule, performance, training and support, test, manufacturing, and disposal. SE considers both the business and the technical needs of all customers with the goal of providing a quality product that meets the user needs." The intent of INCOSE definition may have been to capture the full context wi...

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Background A factor related to students’ course performance that has seen limited research compared to other academic factors is the time of day a class is offered. Because of students’ chronotypes (i.e., preferred time of day to study or work), time of class can influence attendance, which has a strong correlation with students’ performance in a course. Purpose/Hypothesis The goal of this study was to investigate the relationship between class time, students’ attendance including individual and average class attendance, and students’ final grades in an active learning course. Design/Method The grade and attendance records of 1,577 first‐year engineering (FYE) students enrolled in 15 sections at different times of the day were analyzed using Tukey's Honestly Significant Difference and Multi‐Level Modeling to identify whether the performance and attendance of students in the early morning sections were significantly different from those in the other sections and to differentiate the individual and class attendance in relation to students’ grades. Results Students enrolled in early morning and late Friday afternoon classes had lower attendance and final grades than students in other sections. Class average attendance had a significant relationship with students’ grades. Thus, in active learning classes, both an individual student's and classmates’ absences have a negative relationship with an individual student's grade. Conclusion FYE students are more likely to miss early morning classes. In a course based on active learning, this lower attendance has a negative relationship with student performance for all students in the class, including the ones who attend the class regularly, suggesting active learning may amplify the negative effects of missing classes.