Construction Engineering—Reinvigorating the Discipline Gregory A. Howell 1 ; Glenn Ballard 2 ; and Iris Tommelein, A.M.ASCE 3 Abstract: Construction engineering is all about production, and producing something useful is the very reason for projects to exist. How then to explain why construction engineering has progressively fallen out of focus in construction project management education and research? For an answer, the development of the discipline of construction management since the 1950s must be understood, a development that yielded a non-production-oriented approach to project management, one that provides the currently accepted operating system for man- aging the work in projects. This paper first traces the history of the development of the traditional operating system and related commercial terms and organizational practices. It argues that traditional practices rest on an assumption that careful development of a project schedule, managing the critical path, and maximizing productivity within each activity will optimize project delivery in terms of cost and duration. Subsequently, an alternative operating system, developed and proposed by the Lean Construction community, is described. In contrast to the traditional approach, lean defers detailed planning until closer to the point of action, involves those who are to do the work in designing the production system and planning how to do it, aims to maximize project performance (not the pieces), and exploits breakdowns as op- portunities for learning. The history of this development will be traced in broad strokes. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CO.1943-7862.0000276. © 2011 American Society of Civil Engineers. CE Database subject headings: Project management; Construction materials; Construction methods. Author keywords: Construction operations; Project management; Construction engineering; CPM; Lean construction. Introduction Professor Henry Parker at Stanford University completed a report for the Bureau of Yards and Docks of the US Navy in 1965. His observation in the third paragraph of the introduction is clear and bold (Parker 1965). “This study includes the observation and recordings of hundreds of jobs. It has reinforced an earlier conclusion that, in general, con- tractor organizations are abdicating their responsibilities to run their work efficiently. Procedures for doing the job are, too often, being controlled by semiskilled supervisors, craftspeople, and laborers. Management guidance is lacking at the level where many dollars are actually being wasted. ” Now 45 years later, little has changed in relation to the way work is structured—who does what, when, where, and how. The authors attribute this lack of development to a combination of factors: • Dominance of the activity centered operating system (ACOS) of current project management, • Increased reliance on specialty contractors (this may itself be a function of the ACOS), and • Increased technical, organizational, and regulatory complexity of projects (complexity means both more complicated because of lots of pieces and complex in the sense that the cause- and-effect relationships between components or dimensions of performance are not understood in key areas). The paper will review the development of ACOS, its relation- ship with organizational practices and commercial terms as they developed in the context of the times, and efforts to improve project performance. It is proposed that the development of a lean operat- ing system creates new research and practice opportunities for the discipline of construction engineering. Domains of Project Delivery The development of traditional project management and how practices evolved can be understood and explained in terms of three domains: operating system, organization, and commercial terms. These are also listed in Table 1. Traditional Project Management How Did the Current Approach to Project Management Develop? The roots of current project management lead at least back to Karol Adamiecki (1866–1933), who developed a “Theory of Work Harmonization” and a tool for graphical analysis similar to those of Gantt, the “harmonogram” (Marsh 1975). Peter Morris traces the development of the critical path method (CPM) back to Adamiecki and forward to the development of project management applied today (Morris 1994). Morris details the role of military planning and the Second World War and how this led to the development of CPM. There are two commonly understood sources for its application in construction: program evaluation and review tech- nique (PERT), the probabilistic approach used by the U.S. Navy for contract control, and the deterministic approach developed by E. I. DuPont de Nemours and Sperry-Rand Corporation. The U.S. Navy’ s Bureau of Yard and Docks contracted with Stanford in the late 1950s to report on “The Application of 1 Executive Director, Lean Construction Institute (corresponding author). E-mail: ghowell@leanconstruction.org 2 Director, Project Production Systems Laboratory, Civil and Environ- mental Engineering Dept., Univ. of California—Berkeley, Berkeley, CA. E-mail: ballard@ce.berkeley.edu 3 Director, Project Production Systems Laboratory; and Professor, Environmental Engineering Dept., Univ. of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA. E-mail: tommelein@ce.berkeley.edu Note. This manuscript was submitted on June 24, 2010; approved on August 18, 2010; published online on August 1, 2010. Discussion period open until March 1, 2012; separate discussions must be submitted for in- dividual papers. This paper is part of the Journal of Construction Engi- neering and Management, Vol. 137, No. 10, October 1, 2011. ©ASCE, ISSN 0733-9364/2011/10-740–744/$25.00. 740 / JOURNAL OF CONSTRUCTION ENGINEERING AND MANAGEMENT © ASCE / OCTOBER 2011 J. Constr. Eng. Manage. 2011.137:740-744. Downloaded from ascelibrary.org by UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA on 11/28/12. Copyright ASCE. For personal use only; all rights reserved.