Pull planning with trade foremen: a practical first session
Your company wants to try pull planning on the next phase, and you have booked the trailer for Thursday at 13:00. Six trade foremen are coming, most of them for the first time. One has already asked whether this is the meeting where they get told their dates.
In pull planning, the foremen who will do the work plan a phase backwards from its finish milestone: each trade says what it needs from the trade before it, and that trade promises when it will deliver. Lean planning calls these foremen last planners, the people closest to the work with the authority to make reliable commitments for their trade. The session works when they write their own promises and fails when it turns into the superintendent announcing dates.
- Pick one milestone and describe it in a sentence every trade will read the same way. Send it with the invitation at least a week ahead, and ask each foreman to come knowing their work for it.
- Invite the foremen who will run the work, not only their project managers.
- Prepare the wall: roll paper on a long clear wall, one sticky-note colour per trade, and markers readable from a step back.
- Start at the milestone. Put it at the right-hand end; the trade whose work completes it places the first note just to its left and says what it needs before it can start.
- Let each foreman write and place their own notes: name, the work delivered, the area, crew size and days. On the first pass, add no contingency, and split anything longer than a week.
- Walk the plan together once every request has a promise. Challenge the logic and durations against the milestone, and agree where any buffer goes.
- Capture it before anyone leaves: photograph the wall, list the constraints raised, and move the next three weeks into the look-ahead.
Opening the session
Common mistakes
- The superintendent writing the notes for the trades.
- Planning forward from today instead of backwards from the milestone.
- Notes too big to check, such as "Drywall level 3 — 4 weeks".
Checklist
Bring to the first session
- One milestone, described in a sentence
- The foremen who will run the work
- Roll paper, sticky notes in a colour per trade, markers
- Drawings of the area being planned
- A sheet for constraints raised on the day
Check your understanding
Why should each foreman write and place their own note, rather than the superintendent doing it for them?
