22nd Annual Conference of the International Group for Lean Construction - Oslo, Norway - 2014

Developing a Production System on IPD: Considerations for a Pluralistic Environment

Patricia Tillmann1, Klas Berghede2, Glenn Ballard3 & Iris D. Tommelein4

1 Postdoctoral Scholar at Project Production Systems Laboratory (p2sl.berkeley.edu), Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, Univ. of California, Berkeley, 407 McLaughlin Hall, CA 94720-1712, USA, Phone +1 (408) 6301320, [email protected]
2Production Manager at Cathedral Hill Hospital Project, HerreroBoldt. 1200 Van Ness Av. San Francisco, CA. 94109, USA. Phone (415) 264-1055
3 Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, and Research Director of the Project Production Systems Laboratory (p2sl.berkeley.edu), 212 McLaughlin Hall, Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-1712, USA, Phone +1 (415) 710-5531, [email protected]
4Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering. Department, and Director of the Project Production Systems Laboratory (p2sl.berkeley.edu), 212 McLaughlin Hall, Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-1712, USA, Phone +1 (510) 643-8678, [email protected]

Abstract

As Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) becomes a common method for delivering built infrastructure, the importance of elements such as collaboration, trust, integrated governance and collective decision-making is widely discussed. Questions are raised about how to successfully leverage these elements on integrated projects. This paper suggests seeing an integrated team as a pluralistic network and focusing on principles of pluralistic coordination to align decisions and actions towards an established direction. In pluralistic networks, the traditional hierarchical organization with clear chains of command and a homogeneous community is substituted by a more distributed decision-making process and the project team composed by people with different backgrounds. For people to work together effectively in such environments, coordination is essential. Past research has offered a set of key principles that help achieve such coordination. This paper presents a study that was carried out through action research to support the design of a production system in an integrated project based on those principles. Among the study’s outcomes was the establishment of an environment that incentivizes team members sharing and discussing their concerns and expectations, and the alignment of decisions and actions based on what was discussed and agreed by the team. Although the research was limited to only the initial phase of a production system design, an environment that incentivizes open communication to coordinated action was observed. This paper focuses, therefore, on describing the key elements that contributed to establishing such an environment

Keywords

Integrated Project Delivery, Pluralistic Coordination, Production System Design

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Reference

Tillmann, P. , Berghede, K. , Ballard, G. & Tommelein, I. D. 2014. Developing a Production System on IPD: Considerations for a Pluralistic Environment, 22nd Annual Conference of the International Group for Lean Construction , 317-328. doi.org/

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