Pull Planning as a Mechanism to Deliver Constructible Design

The team at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Expansion project adopted the pull planning process as a mechanism for collaboration between the design team and the construction team to prepare a constructible set of design drawings that would curb any post-permit design changes due to cost, constructability or coordination issues. Pull planning helped the team come up with a process that was comprehensive, transparent, flexible and collaborative and eliminated overproduction. This process was a new way of planning for the team members. A process that was initially perceived as “stating the obvious” soon turned out to be a process that helped discover misinterpretations of scopes of work between the team members. It became a tool to define who is supposed to do what, and when, and a tool to track commitments, and to ensure all prerequisites are identified. The plan-do-check-act cycle of pull planning demanded continuous involvement of team members which was resource intensive. The team was gradually able to attain a balance between the necessary level of detail in the pull plan and the collaboration time required.