Transcript: Disrupting Ourselves in the Built Environment: Touchplan

The reality of the industry that we're in, it's highly specialized, it's complex. There's a lot of people involved, a lot of moving parts, and there's a system that's been built and put in place. The traditional system is somewhat silent. It puts company first, project second, and that dynamic has created this, okay, well, we've got a sandbag, we've got to protect ourselves here, we've got to add some float here, we've got to put some contingency here. So we've built in mechanisms to defend ourselves, our business, against kind of the onslaught of the way the industry is set up.

And what Last Planner does and helps along with is breaking down those barriers so that teams, if you've got people that are making commitments to one another, that you just feel you don't want to let them down, you don't want to let the team down. That's a huge premise of this whole planning, and it's working together maybe for the benefit of the project and recognizing when we all pull together, we actually get further along than if we're just trying to take care of our own silo.

It's remarkable. We know this to be true. How many times have I watched sports games and the announcer says, well, this is a good team. They work together as a team. This one's got a team of individual contributors, and so they might pull one off here, but the better team is going to have the better results.

That's true here as well. I mean, think about a project that was going poorly, that did have a problem, brazy bad problem. What do they do? They stop and they pull everybody together and they say, we've got to figure this out as a team. That's coming down the line, and it will be here.

I don't doubt it, but today, if you want to make an impact in your business, be implementing the last planner system. If you want to see improved the way things are going and you're an owner, an improvement on your project, you should be demanding that they do the last planner system. Hello and welcome to the Constructor Podcast, the best way to build it, episode number 83. I'm your host, Brittany Campbell-Turner, and this podcast is dedicated to helping property owners have certainty in their decisions about their construction projects.

We talk about fostering trusting relationships, help you to understand how to lower risk, be under budget and on schedule, and most importantly, exceed your end user's desires. Last week, we spoke with attendees from the Lean Construction Institute Design Forum. We covered how to improve a team's psychological safety. We talked about how to use Scrum on the project team and in daily life. We talked about last planner and the benefits of it in learning sessions, in the keynote discussion, and panel discussions.

We had an awesome crew of people responding at the LCI Design Forum, all with the focus on design, as this event was actually done in conjunction with the American Institute of Architects and P2SL. So if you haven't listened to that episode, please check it out. You'll listen to Glenn Ballard. He's actually the co-founder of the Lean Construction Institute. And you're really in for a treat if you listen to it.

Go ahead and check it out at constructor.com slash EP82. As Danielle de Bunchio, CEO of ViaTechnic, whom I've had the opportunity to meet and share the stage with, she says that the data that we're actually collecting is currently in small proportion of the data that we can collect and learn from. We have the opportunity to learn from our actions and actually disrupt our own industry. If we don't disrupt it, other non-industry companies will come and innovate for us. That's my paraphrase, of course, but I agree with her in that disruption should come from within the industry and we need to think fast of how to do this effectively.

I'm speaking with a few companies that understand that and have spoken with me about how they're looking at the industry to support more relationship driven processes, allow for communication to happen in real time, and even faster offers for real estate. So the next set of interviews that I am doing and will be released in the next couple of weeks, including today's episode, are going to be discussing software solutions that help us to advance the built environment. Okay, as it is fitting to follow up from the Lean Construction Institute design form recap, we are speaking with Michael Carr from TouchPlan.

Michael Carr is the president of MOCA's software products division, TouchPlan, and a co-founder of MOCA. He has 20 years of construction management experience with significant expertise in project controls. He currently leads the development of TouchPlan. Prior to launching TouchPlan, he served in multiple leadership and operational roles within MOCA, providing construction management services to owners. So Michael comes with a breadth of experience around technology and working with general contractors.

He understands the value of what scheduling looks like on the job site today and also the benefits of doing it collaboratively. For all company functions, for project teams, for owners, to build a record of trusted information. With that, let's get into the interview with Michael Carr. We are interviewing Michael Carr. He is the president of MOCA's software products division called TouchPlan and a co-founder of MOCA.

He has 20 years of construction management experience with significant expertise in project controls. I'm out of my own heart. He currently leads the development of TouchPlan. Prior to launching TouchPlan, he served in multiple leadership and operational roles with MOCA, providing construction management services to owners. So Michael, welcome to the Constructor Podcast.

Brittany, thank you for having me. This is a great, great opportunity to be here and just talk with you about some of the stuff that's really passionate to me and I guess it's passionate to you as well. I'm definitely happy to have you on today to kind of give a baseline to the audience. Tell us a little bit about your journey. I know that you first out of college, you started working for a general contractor, but I want to know how that led you to this point.

It was in college. I felt I wanted to do more than just sit behind a desk all day. And I remember as a kid going to construction sites with my dad, he was in a construction company and visiting and seeing the activity and thought, well, that's pretty cool. I want to do that. Got out of college, graduated, went to Seattle and joined a general contractor there and they had me on as a project engineer.

And when my eyes were opened up, those first few months, just seeing how it was done. A lot of work involved paper. A lot of time was spent documenting and recording. I was kind of surprised at that. I thought there'd be more kind of looking forward and thinking about what's coming down the pipe.

That's not to say we didn't do some of that. I mean, there was some reviewing of submittals and that sort of thing, but it felt like it was after the fact. It was almost like the die had been cast and what's going to happen is going to happen. And I thought that just feels backwards. And so my stint before joining that company, you know, I was pretty caught up with software and robotics and, you know, the kind of cool technology as a kid and seeing that wasn't really the common place in the industry.

Just led me to think, you know, there's got to be a way to kind of bridge that gap and do more there. And so that's kind of what drew me into doing what I'm doing now, software for the construction industry. I just love how we're in alignment and sort of what we've seen. And I think there are a lot of other people who have come out of that frustration of seeing that paper backwards process. I like the example that you said.

The die has already been cast. It's so true. And then, yeah, just the project control side of things. There's so many details and you're referencing old information. It's incredible what people are still doing today.

That led you to software. TouchPlan now. It's the software platform that allows for the last planner method is pull planning to be done digitally. There are people who may not be familiar with what the last planner method is who are listening. So I wanted to just ask if you could simply describe that so that we could sort of have a baseline and then we can get into lean a little more.

The last planner system was developed by Lynn Ballard and Greg Howell. They were thinking of trying to come up with a way to do what they called production control as opposed to project controls. Really thinking more along the lines of the actual final planning and execution, if you will, that goes on in the field. And it does go on whether you're using a system like the last planner or not. There is just a gap between whatever the schedule is or whatever the last thing that was kind of discussed or planned out.

There's a gap between that and what actually happens in the field because there's just so much detail around what's involved there. And so the idea was to give the people that do that work, these folks called them the last planners, a forum to plan together and come up with a solution that is a little bit more efficient and takes into account kind of the best thinking from the project team. So we had a team of experts that are in a room together and they all know their piece very, very well, better than anybody else.

It makes sense to get them to talk and come up with a method for putting everything together, recognizing that they all kind of hold the piece of the puzzle. That's at a high level. There's a basic process that's been set up to kind of help people to do that because it's not necessarily straightforward how you might go about getting a whole bunch of folks to work together. That's kind of at a high level. I don't want to go into too much detail unless you want me to, but I'd be happy to.

One thing I know is that there are lots of post-its involved. And the original process that Glenn Ballard and Greg Howell prepared, it was literally setting up a schedule on a wall and having specific, we call them swim lanes, right? In order for each trade that's representing the last planner of each trade, right? They go ahead and put up their milestones. They go ahead and put up the specific activities they plan on doing and then some particular elements per each activity so that they can understand what the other trade work is that's dependent upon theirs and things of that nature.

So similar to a schedule, but not top down. It's the last planner's planning. They kind of are talking about the final, the term pole planning comes from the idea of working backwards. And the whole concept there was to basically say, well, what's the last thing that we need to do to achieve that milestone that you talked about? And then, okay, once we have identified what that is, well, that person or that team that does that last thing, they identify what are the things they need in order for them to start.

And so they'll say, well, I need X and Y. So then X and Y are the next to last things. And they kind of work their way backwards that way just to kind of clear out the clutter so you don't say I need everything. And then you come up with a more efficient process. The other side of the last planner system is that the whole intent is to build some kind of a flow in the system where as a trade completes an area and moves on to another area, a trade that's right behind them kind of follows in.

It's almost like they've got a train going through the project and there's little space or gaps between them. So there's really tight handoffs. And that all drives up efficiency, which is a big benefit to the whole last planner system. It's a pretty cool concept and it takes a little bit of practice to do, but it's not all that difficult to figure out. And I think the whole idea with the Post-it notes that you mentioned, it's just an easy forum for people to record what they've agreed upon and work together.

Rather than giving people more difficult systems, it was like, look, it's very visual. Let's just put Post-it notes up on the wall and organize them in a way that tells us who's first, who's second, and that sort of thing. And that was the whole premise. They wanted to have a low barrier of entry. Yes.

Yeah, it makes total sense. Some of the benefits, right? So you already mentioned a few. It increases efficiency. But what does it do for the team in that room when the last planner method is actually taking place?

What's the dynamic that you've seen? Well, the really cool thing about the last planner system is that it involves those people that are actually responsible for getting the job done and it brings them into the process. So they come together, put together a plan. Obviously, we have their best thinking, so it's usually a better plan than what one person can do on their own. So that's a benefit.

You start off with a better plan right from the get-go. But then the other thing that happens is, well, it's their plan. And so there's some ownership, pride of ownership there, and that actually drives up everybody's accountability to one another. It's like, yeah, I said I could do it. I'm going to do it.

And when that happens, a really amazing thing happens. Things start on time because work that was scheduled to be done is done on time. And so one of the big issues that we have in construction, and I was talking to a mechanical trade contractor, this is traditional execution, a few months ago, and they were saying, look, 30% of the time I show up to the job site and it's not ready for me. And he's the mechanical guy. He's the he's putting in the duct work, which is one of the first things that goes on the floor.

Well, and it's the most expensive trade most of the time. Right, right. But if 30% of the time he's showing up and he can't start because something's in his way, then think of the poor souls that are later in the process behind them. It's only going to get worse. The main thing that happens is these trades are making commitments to each other.

The byproduct of that is they're feeling responsibility to one another and they're finishing their bits on time, which allows for the immediate start as planned. That just pulls that whole schedule in and keeps everybody kind of flowing and working together. Another big thing about the last planar system is there's a big emphasis on looking ahead, kind of clearing out constraints or blockers. The term would be like make ready is something you might hear them say. The whole purpose there is to identify issues or the things or blockers out in the future that need to be taken care of now, like getting a submittal approved or a response to a question answered or getting a permit, material delivery scheduled, getting that thing dealt with now so that when the time comes to do the work that's planned, we're ready to go.

Then the last kind of cool thing about the whole system is it's intended to be a continuous learning process. Just because we might get it wrong the first week in terms of our coordination or our estimate on how long it's going to take to do something doesn't mean that we can't next week fix that. The whole idea is if I said I was going to be done on Tuesday and oh my goodness, something happened and it looks like I'm going to be finished on Wednesday, this is our first go around, okay, I missed.

That means everybody behind me is going to start a little late and we got a bit of a problem there but we can work together to figure out how to solve it. But if I'm going to do that same scope of work, if you will, on a different floor next week, well now I know and I can either bring extra crew to make sure I don't miss next week or I can just tell everybody, you know what, it's going to be a day later every time from now going forward and let's just plan around that.

They can do that right now as opposed to months and months go by and we think we're on track and then suddenly, oh my goodness, we're a month late. Oh my goodness. So one thing I've also experienced is that, you know, once this whole plan schedule is done, there's a documentation process that takes place. Either it's put in a Microsoft project or P6 or whatever scheduling software and it's printed out and it's posted on a wall on the job site and I find that sort of dynamic continues to take place.

It's not just that initial session. It's exactly like you described with the mechanical contractor, right? They can plan instead of just plan to be late after they hear the bad news. So I think it's incredible how something just as small as communication and accountability can make such a big difference but at the same time, it's sort of a no-brainer. Right.

Yeah, it goes without saying that if you've got people that are making commitments to one another that you just feel you don't want to let them down. You don't want to let the team down. That's a huge premise of this whole system. It's really collaborative planning and it's working together maybe for the benefit of the project and recognizing when we all pull together, we actually get further along than if we're just trying to take care of our own silo, make sure our own team is busy all the time or what have you.

It's remarkable. We know this to be true. How many times have I watched, you know, sports games and the announcer says, well, this is a good team. They work together as a team. This one's got a team of individual contributors and so, you know, they might pull one off here, but the team is the more consistent that the better team is going to have the better results.

It goes without saying that that's true here as well. I mean, think about a project that was going poorly, that did have a problem, crazy bad problem. What do they do? They stop and they pull everybody together and they say, we've got to figure this out as a team. So they default to it when things get really bad and I think the whole idea of the last five is you don't need to wait till things get really bad to do it.

Just do it. Yep. Well, to your point, let's talk a little bit about pre-construction. The owner's involvement as well, designer's involvement as well. How often, just based upon your experience with the software with Touchplan, are you seeing and hearing of designers and owner-operators finding the benefit enough to be involved with the last planner system projects?

From an owner's perspective, it opens your eyes to all of the kind of the subtleties and the key decisions and the things that have to be done now to ensure a successful project. One of the things that we've heard with folks that are using our applications is like, we love how simple it is to convey information to the owner. A lot of things go on on the job site that are out of the owner's control, but one thing that certainly is in their control is making those decisions on scope and making those in a timely fashion.

And so understanding, gee, I'd like to make this change and make this request, understanding what the implications are and being able to visualize it, see that, be part of the process really helps not only the project along, because now we're making more informed decisions, but it helps the owners kind of stay abreast with, I get it, I understand what's going on. So it kind of relieves some of the tensions that might naturally be there when you don't know. And then on the design side, the really interesting thing about design, and I've got more of a general contractor background, so I've heard, obviously I've heard the terminologies around the designers don't know how to plan.

It's not that they don't know how to plan, they do. What they do, what designers do on a dime, they could change a direction, right? It's like the flight of the imagination. You can just change your approach at the snap of a finger. Honestly, it's difficult to have a plan in an environment that you change faster than you're able to actually update your plan and change your plan.

Traditional planning, you know, with the CPM scheduling just doesn't really work when you're in design. But something like the last planner where it's really fluid, where you're actually able to just pick up post-it notes, whether they're virtual or paper, and move them around in real time. Now the barrier to kind of updating the plan is a lot less. Now it's okay. Now it makes sense.

Yeah, let's plan. Let's go ahead and plan it because it's not going to take me a day to plan this change only to take me two hours to actually execute the change, right? Now the replanning can speed up. So those are really two huge benefits that we're seeing, both from the owner's perspective, and from the team's perspective. But we still have some work to do to get them on board with the idea, from my understanding.

I was at the Lillian Construction Institute Design Forum. It's an interesting concept for designers to wrap their head around. I'm going to now plan my design based upon how it's going to impact the remaining portion of the project, literally the construction of it. And it is around that decision making that you mentioned from the owner's side, because You have to do the two things simultaneously. Make decisions, designs, make decisions, make design, make decision, you know, do some more design.

It's iterative. But if you understand those critical points in which certain decisions should be made, what you can do is plan around that and put those milestones on the board. I'm interested in seeing this applied more often and seeing more project teams do this. But it comes back down to that collaborative approach and deciding to work as a true team, break down some of those barriers. The reality of the industry that we're in, it's highly specialized.

It's complex. There's a lot of people involved, a lot of moving parts. And there's a system that's been built and put in place. The traditional system is somewhat silent. It puts company first, project second, for the most part.

And that dynamic has created this, okay, well, we've got a sandbag, we've got to protect ourselves here. We've got to add some float here. We've got to put some contingency here. So we've built in mechanisms to defend ourselves, our business, against kind of the onslaught of the way the industry is set up. And what Last Planner does and TouchPlan helps along with is breaking down those barriers so that teams can collaborate, start getting a benefit.

And so all those mechanisms that are in place and built in there, they kind of start coming out and coming down. We've talked with some folks at Trade Contractor, and they're talking to a general contractor who's just implemented the Last Planner system and things went really well with TouchPlan or what have you. And they said to the general, on the next job, are we going to do this again on the next job? You guys doing this going forward? The answer is, yeah, we're going to do this on the next job.

And they said, well, I'm going to be able to knock my price down. I'm going to be able to, because we're more efficient here. It's just a huge opportunity here to attack that inefficiency and all those defense mechanisms that are in the system, pull them out so that we can get more done together. It's really compelling. It is incredible.

So there are a couple of studies that LCI has done around the implementation of lean methodologies, but in conjunction with the integrated project delivery model. And the Last Planner system can be utilized without an integrated contract. It always seems to be coming back to the decision, essentially, to be collaborative. The decision to be more intentional about being transparent. And it was interesting, again, when I was at the design forum, I was able to speak with Glenn Ballard.

He talked about creating an environment of psychological safety where people feel comfortable and feel like they won't get chastised for talking about the problems that they actually foresee coming up. And also those pads, right? Those pads, those contingencies of time, even the fat on their price. They're okay with sharing their real cards, putting them face up on the table. I think it's incredible how that dynamic simply just changes, again, with accountability, communication, just the environment where transparency is acceptable.

Setting up that environment is critical. And the main reason for it and why it's so important is because the industry is built in a fashion that is opposed to that. It's very risk-averse. It's all about managing risk, offloading the risk. Nobody wants to take risk.

And so if you're talking about doing some new system like the last planner, and it means that you got to actually share some information that might be beneficial to another trade or maybe the general contractor or what have you, yes, it's going to benefit the project. But if you're in an environment where you're the only one doing that, that's pretty scary. I mean, right? Now you've just kind of disadvantaged yourself and your business, and nobody wants to do that. You lose your job.

But there's more to be gained when everybody does it. When everybody's working together, there's more to be gained. And that's what a whole crop of people are coming to terms with and understanding is that when we do this and we do it properly, we do better than when we play the old game and do it the old way. So let me ask you this. Do you have any stats, any specific examples that you can share with us about projects that have implemented the last planner system and or used a touch plan in order to really see some of those benefits that we've been discussing?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I've been combing through literature to see some studies and some reports in terms of statistics on that very thing. And it's funny that it's pretty much anecdotal. A lot of it is anecdotal. I think there was one that was the best one I saw was something where there was an outfit, I believe it was in San Diego, a considerable portfolio project being constructed.

They did some with the last planner system and some without. They did an analysis comparing the two and they definitely saw an improvement, you know, 15, 20 percent improvement in terms of reduced schedules. And that obviously contributes to reduced costs. So that's kind of this stuff I was able to find out in the world. But closer to home with touch plan, obviously, we're working with companies and we're able to get a better sense of what's going on on their particular projects.

And I can give you a handful of examples here. We had one company that was doing an office renovation. Their original schedule was a 35 week project. So it wasn't huge, huge. It was like a couple of year kind of thing.

Their 35 week schedule, they were able to cut six weeks out of it. So that's like 17 percent savings. They were also able to turn around and reduce the general conditions fee by $25,000. And in this case, the owner benefited from that. It wasn't like a fixed general conditions fee.

And that's a 10 percent savings. So that's an example, six weeks out of 35 weeks. Another one we have here is a hospital. They were doing a hospital expansion. It was a 34 week project.

They cut seven weeks out of their schedule and it was in the middle of an active functioning hospital. And that's another kind of key thing here is when you're using the last planters. I think I mentioned this at the beginning. The owners can be informed in a functioning hospital where you can't have certain systems go down at certain times because we need the OR up. We can't have vibrations at this hour or whatever it is.

That's just an extra layer of the plan around. And you really do need to plan around it. And you got to make sure that you're not doing the things that you should be doing because it impact the operation of the hospital. Here they were able to cut seven weeks out of a 34 week project. That's over 21 percent savings.

There's no doubt in my mind. I'm convinced that this is the easiest, most direct way to increase efficiency on projects and actually deal with some of the other issues like we're seeing in the industry with labor shortages and that sort of thing. I'm convinced this is by far and away the most compelling and advanced way to move the needle on the productivity, if you will, in terms of getting stuff done in these projects right now. Forget about robotics and all that stuff. That's coming down the line and it will be here.

I don't doubt it. But today, if you want to make an impact in your business, be implementing a last planner system. And if you want to see improve the way things are going and you're an owner, an improvement on your projects, you should be demanding that they do the last planner system. Well, to your point, demanding to utilize the last planner system and or any other lean methodology that you can get your hands on that makes sense for your organization. It makes a lot of sense.

And one thing I'd like to share with you, I don't know if I shared this with you before, is when I learned about the last planner system, I think it was 2000, has to be over six years ago, maybe 2012. I went to an AEC. It's the Organization for the Cost Engineers. AAC, yes. Come from project controls background as well.

Schedule management was a big thing. I was calculating liquidated damages and all this fun stuff. They had a day conference, two presentations that just literally rocked me back. There was one by Turner Construction. They talked about how they used the last planner system and did six week look ahead.

And there was another one by Skinder Construction. It was Afshan Barshon who was doing the presentation. And he talked about how, again, six week look ahead and how much time they were able to shave off the schedule. I literally, I said, wait a minute, I'm spending my time calculating liquidated damages. What?

What is happening right now? Like, why is this something that is even in existence and we're not utilizing it? After that, that literally is what put me on the road to learning more about what this lean thing is all about. So having mentioned Skinder, I understand that you're doing quite a bit of integration with them, work with them. I want to learn a little bit about what the experience has been.

They've been on a long journey, I understand, with lean. They've actually had some rocky times whereby they were looking at what are we going to do to really revitalize the business. And they found lean as well and they were able to do that. But share with us what your work has been like. Absolutely.

Yeah. With him a year and a half ago, I guess. And Skinder has been an enterprise customer of TouchPlan for about that long, a little over a year now. They've got it implemented on all their projects as a standard way, company-wide, to do the last planner system. Some of the benefits that you get out of that, obviously, is now you've got a standard that people can follow.

And when you go from one job to the next, the idea is, well, you should be able to implement it the kind of the same way. We can also start comparing and seeing how are things going on the projects. Are some projects having more success than others and what areas can we help them improve on? Are they making adequate commitments? Are they finding success?

And so you can actually provide targeted help to your project teams because now you've got them all with a standard system. Skinder is an amazing company. They are looking ahead in terms of what's the next hill to take? How do we take it? They were one of the first to kind of really dive into the whole last planner system.

And they've gone, obviously, beyond that into other areas of lean. I met with Mark Skinder a couple months ago and they had just acquired a design outfit there in Chicago with the whole design build aspect of their business. They're also moving into picking up some assets in the manufacturing side. So they're really working the whole value chain and trying to make a lean system, not just lean construction, but a whole end to end, a lean experience for the owner when they come on board. They brought TouchPlan in to be kind of part and integral to that as well.

So we're really excited working with them and they've got some great ideas and features and things that they like us to add. So we're adding them and putting that stuff in there. It's just a great partnership. Super excited to be on that team. And spoilers again, I'm coordinating an interview with Skinder with actually, hopefully, all of the people that are involved in new approach that they have, the design, the manufacturing.

Hopefully, Mark will be in there too. So that's going to be a fun interview. Let's talk specifically about TouchPlan. I mean, we're kind of touching on it a little bit, but I really want to understand, like, what does it do? And then who's your regular adopter?

What we've tried to do is we've tried to take the Last Planner system and put it in a framework that is as accessible as would be with, say, the Post-it notes and is simple to interact with as Post-it notes, but has the power of being digitized and providing all of the extra benefits, some of which I mentioned in terms of standardization, that you get when something is digitized. You're able to do the Last Planner system end to end in our application. We stay true to it.

That's preeminent to what we do is we try to stay true to that system. So if you're familiar with it, then you shouldn't have any problems kind of understanding how our thing works. But even if you're not familiar with the Last Planner system, the nice thing about TouchPlan is it's kind of got the bumpers up, if you will, keeps you in the lane. So you can't stray too, too far. But basically, you're able to go in and drop in kind of your master schedule, your key milestones from your master schedule right in our application.

That drives the generation of your phases. And so you can do your phase scheduling. That's where the whole planning comes in. And everybody has access to the app, a real time environment where you can have 10 people in the room all on their own devices with their own Post-it note colors, if you will. We call them tickets in our app, dropping these tickets on this virtual wall and essentially organizing exactly the way they would if it was with Post-its on a real wall.

The byproduct is, well, once you've done that, we'll calculate the dates for you. You don't need to stand up there and have somebody working math backwards if you're, OK, this is this long. A lot of people take pictures of their walls and then start typing in and it spreads you to whatever. You don't need to do that with TouchPlan. It's already electronic.

So we can give you the dates and we can say, OK, well, you said that you need to be done on such and such a date. That means given the way you've organized your Post-its or your tickets in our app, you need to start by this date. And it might be two weeks ago. And then you're like, OK, let's replan this. Let's see what you don't have.

We're a little late. And so you're able to do that on the fly as opposed to come back the following week and say, hey, guys, we have a problem. You know that pole plan we did last week? We ran the numbers and we should have started two weeks ago. So we need to go back to drawing board.

You don't have to do that. You can do that immediately in the app. The other thing that's really cool is once you've got that plan, that phase schedule, if you will, from the pole plan, the next phase or next step in the last planar system is really to kind of move into kind of commitment management, weekly management. They talk about weekly work plans in the last planar system. Well, the nice thing about TouchPlan is your Post-it notes will be converted into weekly work plan activities automatically for you.

So there's no loss in translation, if you will. And so you can move straight out of the pole planning right into weekly work planning, if you will, and then refine your plan there, moving the moving Gantt bars around now and specifying specific days they work on. And once you've kind of agreed to as a team, hey, this is what we're going to do next week, you can lock it in. Once you lock it into the application, we record that ticket's positions, if you will, its target end date.

And now you've effectively made a commitment that we are tracking on behalf of the whole team. And then obviously you go off and do the work and you come back and you can update your progress and either you did it on time, you finished early, you finished late, or maybe you just couldn't even start and you had to reschedule. Any of those conditions where you didn't quite finish according to plan will get you to specify a variance reason. Why? Why did that happen?

And capture all that information. So that all generates some of the standard metrics that are commonplace in a last planner system you might otherwise have to do with spreadsheets if you're using kind of paper and post-it notes. Like plan percent complete PPC, there's also the variance reasons why. You know, 30% of the time we miss because of whatever changes or materials not being on site on time or whatever it was. And so the team has got information now that they could turn around and use to improve, learn from it and apply that lessons learning, kind of go forward.

So it's a whole kind of end-to-end system. It includes, I didn't mention the constraints, the whole idea of looking ahead and removing blockers. That's in the application as well. One of the kind of interesting things if you do it kind of analog, the old school way, you might have a whiteboard where you write down a list of constraints and it's sitting off on the side next to your post-it notes that are up on the wall, but they're not really linked. So if your post-it note was picked up and moved to an earlier state, technically you need to have that constraint done sooner, but there's no feedback mechanism kind of in the analog world.

Well, in touch blind, you can link those two together. So you could pick up that post-it note and you move it to an earlier state. Well, we'll tell you the earlier date that you need to have your constraint dealt with. Keeps that all locked in place for you. The nice thing is once you've kind of put your thinking together and come up with your plan, all of the key interactions and thing that you want the system to remind you of like, hey, this has to happen before this or remind me if this thing moves, I want to know so that I can account for it.

That's all kind of locked into the system and you don't have to constantly revisit it and look at it in an environment where they're not linked and you have to say, okay, that changed so what are all the things that change now? The system will know. It'll tell you, hey, you got to change this, you got to change that because you changed this one. So it's pretty cool and we're super excited. We're always trying to find ways to make it even easier and the key thing here is to stay true to that last planner system.

We truly believe that it's a real game changer for the industry. The last planner system, we know it works. We talked about all those benefits that take place as a result of people collaborating and being accountable and transparent. One thing I appreciate about what I've observed of TouchPlan is that it takes out the back end work that the project manager or the project engineer will go back and do and increases efficiency from that standpoint as well. They can go and do their work that they actually need to do versus fiddling with whatever software program.

It's already there. Everybody always has access to it on their mobile phones, things of that nature and I think that's incredible. The other key piece here is rather than having one person kind of managing it on behalf of the team, even if you're doing it in some kind of an electronic format, in our system, the team does it themselves. So everybody, if you've got a hundred things that are going on this week, the response to kind of update the progress and update everything. That's a lot of work for that one person, but you got 15 people each responsible or 10 people each responsible.

That's a lot more manageable. You go in, you take your two minutes, your five minutes, you update your seven things and done. If everybody does that, then the whole thing's updated and it's in real time. There's also this division of labor component that is a side benefit of being able to expose everything to the team as opposed to just post it. I want to ask you, what do you think are the next steps for the industry?

The industry is still in this mode of changing out the old way to this new way. So there's still more to be done in terms of adopting and moving forward with this new way of planning, this collaborative approach. But beyond that, we're going to get there. I think that there's something to be said about turning our attention to the successes in other industries and bringing that home. There's been studies done in terms of productivity, different industries, how it's changed over the years.

And agriculture is like up 16x versus what it was back just after World War II and manufacturing is up 11x. Construction is pretty much the same. Some might argue it's a little bit less productive in terms of the output that we're able to get. And that's owing to the fact that we've got complexity of buildings has gone up, but our methods and our approaches, they've improved as well. There's no doubt that they've improved, but they've not improved as significantly as in the other industries.

And it's because we're doing a lot of one-offs. I mean, it's basically what construction is. You get one shot at that one building and then you don't build it again. For the most part, whereas agriculture, manufacturing, they're able to hone the process and improve on it because they keep doing the same thing. Well, they've learned things.

They've done things. And we can look at that and say, look, that had a benefit to that industry, whether it was some kind of technology in terms of a machine or a piece of equipment, robot, if you will, that had a benefit. Or this way of thinking about it had a benefit or maybe this way of dividing up the labor, had a benefit and drawing those lessons learned into the industry. It's being a little bit creative. It's kind of repurposing some lessons learned that don't have a direct application to construction, but thinking about how they could be used.

And I think that's really where this is going. The industry doesn't need to kind of invent something brand new completely off of the wall. It's completely different. There's a lot of great ideas out there and we just need to repurpose them. And that's part of what we're doing here.

The whole idea of last planner system, automated last planner system came to us when we were dealing with software and the software industry has some agile software development and it's all in computers. You don't do agile with thinking it's on a whiteboard. You can, but you don't. So it's like, what do they do in there? How do they set that up?

What are the things that they're giving the users, the power that they're giving users there? Okay, let's bring that some of that to the construction industry. Same can be done with other things as well. I think that's really the future. There's going to be some folks out there that kind of look across industries and say, hey, let's bring this home.

We can use this here. Yeah, I mean, there's so much technology out there. We look at these tech companies. We look at the financial sector now is using blockchain and then we talk a lot about blockchain on the podcast here. There's robotics, like you said, there's so much to be learned from.

I agree with you. That integration, trying to figure out how those advances can really be learned from and apply them here. Well, with that, thank you. I really appreciate this conversation and I had a fun time. No worries.

This was fun. This was awesome. I really appreciate it. The audience wants to learn more about us. Feel free to hit us up at touchplan.io on the website.

They can reach me at mnc at touchplan.io. I'll be happy to share a bit more of what we're doing. But this was awesome, Brittany. I really, really appreciate you having me on here. So much fun being able to talk about where we're going and what we see as the future.

This is great. Thanks for being on the show. If you'd like to learn more about Michael Karr and Touchplan, check out the show notes at constructor.com slash EP 83. If you learned something valuable in this episode, share it with your friends and colleagues. You can also let me know if you enjoyed our discussion by connecting with me on Twitter at Brittany underscore CT or find me on LinkedIn.

Or you can just email me too at Brittany at constructor.com. Next week, we will be speaking with Chris Dorian from BuildSort. Chris is the CEO and founder at BuildSort where BuildSort is a distributed ledger technology and it assists with building and construction to support the supply chain industry, also documentation, project management metrics, and integration with BIM. I look forward to sharing this interview with you guys next week. If you haven't already subscribed to the podcast, you can do so as your preferred podcast player.

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