An Assessment of Lean Design Management Practices in Construction Projects

Abstract

Evidence exists for the application of lean management practices in the design process. However, there is no systematic review of this type of practice that links the design management practices to the lean construction principles. There is no tool to assess the level of use of lean design management practices in construction projects either. Therefore, this paper aims to assess the lean management practices that are performed at the design phase of construction projects. The research was divided into a literature review of design management practices; a validation of lean design management practices with a practice-principle relationship, based on an expert survey; the devolvement of a tool (questionnaire) to evaluate the lean design management practices; and an assessment in 64 construction projects (coherence, reliability, correlation, and descriptive analysis). It is concluded that evidence exists for the implementation of 19 lean design management practices. These practices are grouped into three categories: stakeholder management, planning and control, and problem solving and decision making. Additionally, in the assessment of the 64 projects, it can be observed that the lean design management practices are at initial levels of implementations, so there is a significant development gap. This research proposes a tool to assess management practices in the design phase of construction projects; then, the study identifies implementations gaps, it provides benchmarks with other projects, and it improves the design process through a taxonomy of lean design management practices. been studied to evaluate its performance [7], to implement integrated management systems and visual management tools [8], as well as to optimize this process [6].Technological tools have great potential to improve the performance of projects, particularly in the design phase. However, the problems generated in the design of construction projects cannot be solved with technology alone but require an understanding of the social phenomena related to the processing of individual and collective information [9]. For this reason, certain lean tools can allow higher interactions because they encourage the management of commitment and trust among team members [10][11][12][13].Evidence exists for the application of lean management principles and some of its tools in the design management process [14,15]. For example, Fosse & Ballard [16] presented a case study that demonstrated the change between traditional planning and planning using the last planner ® system (LPS ® ) at the design phase. Although they did not present evidence of the changes in the project s performance, they concluded that the degree of satisfaction of the project s stakeholders increased when the LPS ® was applied during the planning phase of the project. For their part, Knotten et al. [17] emphasized that the use of LPS ® and collaborative planning in the design phase reinforced the trust and commitment among the members of the team, which are both considered fundamental elemen...

Impact of BIM/LEAN on the interaction of construction project design teams

“…(3) data exploration, including reliability analysis, descriptive statistics, association analysis using the Pearson chi-square test, and causal analysis using necessity and sufficiency relationships between both elements through a fuzzy set analysis. identified LDM practices and BIM uses in two previous papers (Herrera et al, 2020a;Rojas et al, 2019). The study by Herrera et al (2020) was selected because it brings together several Lean design management practices applied in real projects in a single document.…”

“…collaborative process mapping, among others. On the other hand, a management practice refers to concrete actions associated with increasing productivity (Bloom & Van Reenen, 2007), such as, specialist designers and builders involvement during early stages of the project, the systematic participation or support of the clients, and the collaborative planning among various stakeholders, among others (Herrera, Mourgues, Alarcón, & Pellicer, 2020a).…”

“…Therefore, the Lean design management (LDM) practices will be the best management practices according to Lean philosophy, which will allow having a better performance in the design phase of a construction project. While Lean has been applied in the design phase of construction projects for more than 20 years (Formoso et al, 1998;Koskela et al, 1997), recently a framework has been proposed that integrates LDM practices and that allows an assessment of the level of implementation of each practice on a scale of 1 to 5 (Herrera et al, 2020a).…”

“…Table 5-1 presents a definition of these 19 LDM practices. Table 5-1: Lean design management (LDM) practices (Herrera et al, 2020a) ID Definition STAKEHOLDER MANAGEMENT SM1 Specialist designers are involved during early stages of the project. SM2 Builders are involved during early stages of the project.…”

“…-1: Koskela's Lean Construction Principles (Herrera, Sanz, et al, 2019) (based on (Koskela, 1992) Table 5-1: Lean design management (LDM) practices (Herrera et al, 2020a) ............... Table 5-2: BIM uses for the planning and design of construction projects (Rojas et al, 2019)................................................................................................................................. Table 6-1: Characteristics of projects A and B according to the selection criteria ........... Table 6-2: Metrics for each network (Herrera et al, 2020b)…”