Eliyahu M. Golratt – Theory of Constraints [TOC] Leads to a Revolution in Manufacturing

I’m a big fan of Eliyahu M. Goldratt, especially his Theory of Constraints (TOC) and his work on bottleneck management. Goldratt revolutionized the manufacturing world with a critical insight into the overall operation of the plant floor. Before Goldratt, local efficiency was the key metric used to measure performance on the shop floor.

Eliyahu M. Goldratt-blog

Imagine that a factory had 10 workstations, each with a specific job in the manufacturing process. At one time, management believed that if each machine was running close to 100 percent of the time then the factory would be as efficient as possible. However, Goldratt figured out that the factory as a whole could only run as fast as its slowest machine. By running machines at disparate production rates to full capacity, the manufacturer was, in fact, just creating work in process (WIP) and jamming up the factory shop floor.

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Using Time-Scaled Virtual Reality to Visualize and Reduce Risk in Construction

Wouldn’t it be great if you could see how a building will come together day by day, based on all of your drawings and your schedule – to really visualize the plan?  That might make a good blog url…

time-blog

4D BIM can accomplish this, to a certain extent. If you ask most practitioners what the benefits of BIM and 4D BIM might be, they will respond with clash detection, more accurate cost information, and facilities management. These are the classic benefits of 3D BIM; the actual level of benefit derived from the implementation of 3D BIM has been quite variable.

But if the model is built correctly, you can see the risks in construction before the first piling is driven.  For instance, you can see that your plan calls for two cranes to be in the same place at the same time, or that your plan calls for material to enter the jobsite through an opening that’s actually too small for the material.

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Visualizing Schedule Risk In Your Mind’s Eye: You See Trouble Ahead

An Idiomatic and Sensory Investigation of Interactive Visual Risk Assessments

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What do we mean when we say “I see trouble ahead?” Notice that we don’t say, “I’ve reviewed a tabular report and I prognosticate problems,” or, “I touched the report you sent, and I feel trouble on the way.” Sometimes people say they can smell trouble, or smell trouble brewing, but most often it is seeing it on a wall, in a diagram, or in our minds eye that enables clear cognition of impending calamity. It’s fair to say that visualization is a key factor in recognizing risk in general.

When it comes to schedule risk, until recently, visualization options have been limited, and disconnected from the actual schedule. Until the development of the Graphical Path Method (GPM) and NetRisk, there was no way to see a schedule on a timescale and interactively visualize the impact of a particular risk on the schedule.

Most conventional schedule risk tools work by importing information from an outside scheduling tool such as  Oracle Primavera Risk Analyzer or Acumen Risk. Once the data is imported, it gets massaged further, ranged and iterated to generate a series of graphs and tabular reports. Experts then interpret these reports and recommend mitigating measures to apply to the schedule.

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Three Things You Must Know About Risk Assessment in Construction

The risk assessment is only as good as the model on which it is built.

The model is built through a process of gathering stakeholders, identifying risks and opportunities, estimating the potential impact and selecting risks and opportunities for quantification.

The quantification process must be disciplined and deliberate.  

Whether you are doing a cost risk assessment, a schedule risk assessment or a combined risk assessment, the process is straightforward. This process is called ranging. When you range a risk, you assign typically three numeric values to the risk: Optimistic, Pessimistic, and Most Likely. For a cost risk, the range might be expressed in dollars or in percentages.  In a schedule risk exercise, the range will likely be expressed in days, but can also be a percentage.

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Choosing a Risk Practitioner: It’s a Risky Business…

Risk assessment is becoming an industry standard. Unfortunately, at this point that is the only standard part of the process. Unlike, say, the field of medicine, you don’t need a license to be a risk practitioner in project management. However, there are a few certifications in the industry that, at the very least, will guarantee a baseline of knowledge and experience.

The Project Management Institute grants a credential called the Risk Management Professional (PMI-RMP). In order to qualify to sit for the exam, a professional must have completed at least 3,000 hours of risk practice. Then they must pass the exam, which is quite comprehensive, in order to get the credential.

In order to maintain the credential, the professional must participate in ongoing education.

AACE International offers a Decision Risk Management Professional designation, which is well regarded in the industry.

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FIATECH 2013 Technology Conference & Showcase: The Visualization of Capital Planning

This conference was held by FIATECH, an innovation-driven nonprofit in the construction industry that promotes technologies that impact the industry. They are very well regarded around the world.

In the panel I spoke on, we focused on visualization in construction. I had the pleasure of leading a discussion on the visualization of capital planning.

The Visualization of Capital Planning

When I do public speaking engagements, I try to bring something new to the conversation. I like to challenge myself when I put together a talk to bring new knowledge or insights to the subject. One of the key insights on this topic is the difference between the graphical path method and the critical path method, including why the graphical path method allows portfolio planning in a way that the critical path method does not.

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