为了欣赏Glenn Ballard对精益项目交付的承诺，请问他关于他奥克兰，加利福尼亚州的果树。，家。

加州大学，伯克利，退休教授和项目管理专家使用拉策划方法种植了他的小果园。每一步都是布局，从采集材料和研究放置（“像很多太阳这样的果树”），选择最好的桃子，无花果杏和苹果树。

“这一点，它建于我的DNA，”巴拉德说，作为一个作者，教育家和顾问致力于提高项目绩效的教育家和顾问。“精益规划的魔力是它只是常识。”

这种脚踏实地的态度从一个小德克萨斯州的小镇带来了巴拉盛，以帮助拯救陷入困境的简单戒律的陷入困境的项目。新利18备用网址他是非营利组织精益建筑研究所（LCI）和国际精益建筑集团的创始成员。巴拉德还为项目生产学院的技术委员会提供服务，世界上最重要的专家组将运营科学应用于复杂的项目。新利18备用网址

一生中永远无法实现精益的理想 - 为客户提供零废物所需的东西 - 但是巴拉德永远不会停止尝试。他几乎意外地前来了项目管理，他的自然好奇心首先向他拉到牧场，教学和企业，直到他坐在夏季建筑工作。现在，他正努力将瘦尺寸施加到来自钻井的各种领域，以便电影制作以及微小的后院果园。

“我认为我实际上没有职业生涯，我有一个科琳，”巴拉德说。

早期

Ballard, 75, grew up in Sabine Pass, Texas, near the Louisiana border, beginning his education in a one-room schoolhouse. As a young man, he planned to emigrate to Australia to run a horse ranch, but a magazine article led him to St. John’s College in Santa Fe, N.M., instead. Later, he was pursuing an MBA at the University of California, Davis, when a summer as a pipefitter’s helper along the Houston Ship Channel changed his trajectory yet again.

“I really enjoyed working with my hands, solving practical problems. I enjoyed the people that I worked with and seeing the fruits of my labor,” Ballard says.

He began his construction career at Brown and Root Industrial Services LLC, and then at Bechtel Corp. At Bechtel he invented the Last Planner, a production control system used by construction firms worldwide.

While still at Brown and Root in 1979, Ballard was tapped to help rescue the Chocolate Bayou Project, a troubled $300-million ethylene plant in South Texas. The Conoco/Monsanto project was overbudget and behind schedule, a situation Ballard partly attributes to the owners.

“They were just like cats and dogs in a bag. They never could agree on anything. They kept changing their minds. It was a mess,” he says.

真正介绍了巴拉德的体验，以精益原则。“之前，它似乎并不像项目真的策划和管理，他们刚刚发生。”新利18备用网址

巴拉德的计划将该项目恢复了计划，并挽救了400万美元，表示，在该项目上工作（ENR，11/27/80）。新利18备用

Another colleague on the Chocolate Bayou project was Greg Howell, who taught Ballard how to conduct method studies using time-lapse photography. It was the beginning of a long collaboration—Casten helped Howell and Ballard form LCI in 1997—that only ended when Howell passed away last year.

In 1994, Casten and Howell solicited Ballard’s help to turn around the $2-billion-plus PARC upgrade project in Cardon, Venezuela. At the time, it was the Western Hemisphere’s largest gasoline refinery, with 12,000 craftsmen employed by 60 subcontractors. The Last Planner system saved billions in lost revenue, Casten says. As the three men flew from Caracas back to the U.S., they worked out the concept of LCI over lunch in Miami.

LCI的使命既简单又大胆

Approach and Adoption

“I’m absolutely convinced from my own experience that the Lean approach is the best way we humans have developed for pursuing sustainability: economic, social and environmental. It hasn’t applied to the last two like the first, but it’s coming,” Ballard says.

Ballard initially thought simply acquainting people with Lean’s concepts would be enough to effect change. And some people seemed excited—at first. Ballard tells about two general foremen with an electrical contractor who turned up at one of his seminars. Impressed, the foremen vowed to push for these new processes and promised to stay in touch.

“We waited and waited,” Ballard says. “Finally, we called one of them up. He said, ‘I’m really embarrassed, but we make too much money off the current waste in the system. We just can’t buy into it.’”

The experience made Ballard think more systematically about the obstacles to adopting Lean principles. He divided his target population into three groups: the early adopters, the “skeptical but reasonable” and the naturally resistant.

“我们的力量是在第二组,”巴拉德说s. “They can be persuaded by argument and logic. They don’t have to have evidence that something succeeded with others before they adopt it. If those people didn’t exist, we wouldn’t have any change in anything.”

这些关键的采用者还对竞争对手和客户的最后一组竞争压力。因此，LCI成员资格和会议爆炸了。“这是一个迹象，我们对他们施加压力。还有很长的路要走，因为压力主要是商业建筑业，而且在工业和基础设施中较少。“

Ballard keeps conducting research and publishing papers. He’s developing a book on target-valued delivery, looking specifically at the challenges of conceptual estimating. This delivery system sets targets for cost, time and product before design to avoid wasted effort and designs that violate project constraints. Designers can’t be blamed if they don’t have clear requirements to bind them, Ballard says.

热爱克制

“Design requires restraint because otherwise the canvas is too big. It’s not a way to restrict innovation and ingenuity, creativity, but rather focusing it so it generates value,” Ballard says.

This love of restraint is clear in Ballard’s work and speaking style, says Todd Zabelle, founder and CEO of Strategic Project Solutions Inc. and an LCI founder.

“We used to say Ballard talks in zip files,” Zabelle says. “What at first glance seems to be a strange or off-the-wall comment or question is almost always far more profound.”

David McKay was introduced to Ballard’s methods in the late 1990s while working for Aera Energy LLC, a joint venture of Shell and Mobil, in the San Joaquin Valley’s Belridge Oil Field. The company wanted to tap into an oil-and-gas field requiring drilling and hydraulic fracturing wells in a very tightly spaced configuration, overlayed by a still-operating oil field. The plan was to drill a thousand 1,000-ft-deep wells in a year. As many as 10-15 wells were clustered in a single one-acre plot, some previously existing and producing, some being drilled, some hydraulic fractured and more.

“I was not a typical project guy,” says McKay, who depended on the Critical Path Method (CPM), which uses modeling and algorithms to create work schedules. “I was initially so pleased and felt kind of like General Patton with my huge room with maps laid out on tables and Gantt charts on the wall, all ready to kick into motion. It was great until the motion actually began!”

该项目在几天内坠毁，定于调度问题和误解增殖。钻井钻井平台闲置和机械施工人员字面意思是用电动人员进入拳击。“直到我一周出去进入田野，才稍后，我真的明白了我创造了什么垃圾箱，”麦凯说。

Luckily, McKay had heard about Ballard and reached out in desperation.

“我对谁持怀疑态度，因为这家伙是谁，因为他是一个”精益“的家伙，他来自伯克利，”麦凯说。“他很友好，但在小谈话中完全无谓。此外，我很惊讶地听到他最初来自德克萨斯州，他的父亲在油田里工作。“

巴拉德立即宣布该项目a victim of “go-and-see” scheduling. Regardless of what is scheduled in the office, the workers in the field were just trying to find a place to work. “It was wasteful and actually, at times, dangerous as work done out of proper sequence can often be,” McKay says.

Instead, Ballard introduced the idea of sequence and flow of work, where the oil field developers stopped looking at batches of work and focused on what needed to be done in the flow. With Ballard’s help, the site became one of Aera’s most important business successes.

“他改变了关于我看法的一切，”McKay说。“他向我介绍了在开发和建设业务中真正革命的原则。最大的挑战一直在改变CPM社区的思想。这在建筑和石油和天然气业务中深深地根深蒂固。它们通常具有高度抗性，可理解的，因为它威胁到他们所做的大部分事情。“

Ballard continues to find new industries for applying Lean principles, including filmmaking. He retired from Berkeley in 2019 but remains a research associate at the Project Productions Systems Laboratory. He is also working as a Lean production adviser on a Netflix film.

“有很多事情要做和学习以及许多需要改变的事情。鲍拉德说，我会坚持下去，只要我有能量，“巴拉德说。