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ABSTRACT:
COMPETING CONSTRUCTION MANAGEMENT PARADIGMS. Lean Construction Journal, Volume 1, issue 1 (October 2004).
Glenn Ballard and Gregory A. Howell1
1 Glenn Ballard is Research Director and Gregory A. Howell is
Executive Director of the Center for Innovation in Project and Production
Management (dba Lean Construction Institute),
gballard@leanconstruction.org, ghowell@leanconstruction.org
The Lean Construction Institute’s (LCI)
goal is to develop and deploy a new way of thinking about and practicing
project management. Projects are conceived as temporary production systems,
to be designed in light of the relevant ‘physics’ of the task
to be accomplished. It is claimed that complex, quick, and uncertain
projects cannot be managed in traditional ways. Detailed CPM schedules,
after-the-fact tracking, earned value analysis, and competitive bidding are
inadequate to the challenge of today’s dynamic projects. There are four roots of this Lean
Construction approach: success of the Toyota Production System,
dissatisfaction with project performance, efforts to establish project
management on a theoretical foundation, and the discovery of facts
anomalous (impossible to explain) from the perspective of traditional
thinking and practice. The last of these four is explored in this paper,
which presents the current state of construction management thinking as one
of conflict between competing paradigms.
KEYWORDS:
Construction management, flow, lean
construction, paradigm, production system, project management, theory,
value, variability, work flow, work flow variability, work structuring.
Paper in PDF
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