Measuring Project’S Team Culture in Projects Using the Last Planner System

Abstract

At this stage, construction industry is known for bad project performances and a culture characterized by adversarial behaviours. The Last Planner  System (LPS) is designed to improve these circumstances through the enhancement of workflow reliability by involving various disciplines in joint planning processes and a culture of collaboration. How to actually measure related project team culture (PTC) is unknown at this stage. This paper tries to close this gap and compares two defined versions of the Ideal Lean Culture for organizations with the actual PTC in projects using the LPS.It first presents the two Ideal Lean Cultures for organizations, based on a framework developed for organizations (the Competing Values Framework -CVF). Next, it examines on the basis of three case studies the applicability of the CVF for measuring the actual culture in project teams using the LPS and compares it with the named Ideal Lean Culture conditions.The paper concludes that the CVF is a suitable tool to take a snapshot of the PTC and that the comparison to the Ideal Lean Culture can give conclusions about the current project team's maturity in projects using the LPS.

Analyzing the Influence of Organizational Culture in Projects using Last Planner System

“…It has many different aspects that are expressed in its leadership, working methods, and communication. A collaborative culture that differs from the standard culture of building projects, is necessary for the successful implementation of LPS (Lühr and Bosch-Rekveldt, 2019). A case study based on the UK building project by Johansen and Porter (2000) states that there is a need to overcome cultural barriers to achieve the promised effectiveness of LPS.…”

“…An organizational culture assessment instrument (OCAI) is used to evaluate and quantify each of these four cultural quadrants. The above-mentioned quadrants are used to create a spider web that helps determine the type of culture that an organization or project adheres to (Cameron and Quinn, 2006;Lühr and Bosch-Rekveldt, 2019). Apart from this Hofstede (2011), also proposed a framework for cultural assessment which is known as "Hofstede" framework.…”

“…It is represented as the grey dashed line. At the same time, the shape highlighted in green is the "German Lean Culture," which is taken from three case studies conducted on the German construction industry by (Lühr and Bosch-Rekveldt, 2019). The replies gathered for each project were then compared to these three varied cultural sets.…”