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A response to critics of lean construction
Glenn Ballard and Lauri Koskela
Abstract
Lean construction advocates criticized the first edition of Graham Winch’s Managing Construction Projects. In the 2nd edition, Winch responds and adds his own criticisms of lean construction. The purpose of this paper is to reply to Winch’s criticisms of lean construction. Other papers will continue the debateregarding the appropriate conceptualization of projects in relation to production, including the question whether organization design is part of production system design.
Regarding the mainstream construction management community, we respectfully propose that it should get rid of certain temporal myopia. Two central concepts of lean construction are production, as a starting point for managingand organizing, and waste, as a focus of improvement. Winch denies the role of production in management and fails to recognize the importance of waste: it is not in the index of his book, although lean production and lean construction is discussed. This is fully aligned to other current literature in management, which – through silence - denies the role of production and waste. However, theseconcepts were present in the management literature preceding the two influential books on business education in 1959 (Gordon & Howell 1959, Pierson 1959). Lean construction represents a continuation of the discussion in the first half of the 20th century, which seems to have become opportune again as a result of the massive criticism on the lack of relevance of management science since the 1980’s.Keywords
Construction management, lean construction, theory
Introduction
This paper continues a discussion with Graham Winch that has taken place primarily in print, beginning with an exchange in the Building Research & Information Forum in 2006, in which Winch’s views on construction management and lean construction, expressed in the 1st edition of his Managing Construction Projects,were criticized (Koskela & Ballard, 2006). Winch replied to those criticisms in that same Forum exchange (Winch, 2006), and has made additional criticisms of lean construction in the 2nd edition of his text.
There are more critics of lean construction, but Graham Winch is widely, and properly, recognized as a leading thinker in the field of construction management. In this discussion, weunderstand ourselves to be in conversation with a number of scholars in the field, and engage in the conversation in hopes of providing more clarity regarding the lean construction movement.
The next section of the paper presents the discussion to date; claims and counterclaims. A critique of Winch’s comments in the 2nd edition follows, leading to a concluding section in which we propose implicationsof the issues in dispute and suggest what the lean construction community can do to initiate fruitful interaction with the mainstream academic community.
Brief history of the discussion
The discussion with Graham Winch has spanned over eight years, from the publication of his major work on construction project management in 2002 (Winch, 2002) to the 2nd edition of that text in 2010. Theprevious contributions to this conversation have been:
A. Winch, G. M. (2002), Managing Construction Projects: an Information Processing Approach, Blackwell, Oxford.
B. Koskela, L., Ballard, G., and Howell, G. (2004), “Project management reconceived from a production perspective”, Proceedings of the CIB World Congress, Toronto, Canada.
C. Koskela, L. and Ballard, G. (2006), “Should projectmanagement be based on theories of economics or production?,” Building Research & Information Forum, 34(2), 154-163.
D. Winch, G. M. (2006), “Towards a theory of construction as production by projects”, Building Research & Information Forum, 34(2), 164-174.
E. Winch, G. M. (2010), Managing Construction Projects: an Information Processing Approach, 2nd edition, Wiley-Blackwell,...