Helping clients get better at delivering projects and programmes has fascinated Hunter for the past fifteen years. His interest was sparked when he met Jim Ross, one of the co-founders of Australia’s ‘Alliancing’ delivery model – where the client and one or more parties work together on projects, with shared risk and reward.
Born and raised in Lower Hutt, Hunter recently returned from 25 years in Australia where he consulted into many of the country’s largest infrastructure jobs.
He says the state of Victoria has forged ahead with delivery efficiency, using methods such as value stream mapping, visual management, integrated project systems, use of A3s, and innovation through cross-project and programme knowledge-sharing.
When it comes to delivery efficiency in the Land of the Long White Cloud, Hunter pulls no punches. Despite improvement occurring, he says it “currently has much more potential”.
He recalls using a delivery efficiency technique called ‘Last Planner’ to bring together those constructing O Mahurangi – Penlink – a new seven-kilometre highway between Whangaparāoa Road and State Highway 1.
“Last Planner involves structured sessions where discipline leads, and team members collaborate to develop the delivery program. The sessions encourage open discussions to identify and resolve issues related to discipline interfaces, sequencing, and staging before they disrupt workflow.”
WSP has used Last Planner internally for a stormwater piping project and on Auckland’s Northern Pathways project. It’s just one among an alphabet soup of ‘lean construction’ delivery efficiency tools – where projects are made more efficient and cost-effective.
DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, and Control), root cause analysis, and the A3 worksheet process – a problem-solving approach developed by Toyota for manufacturing, are among other examples.
“Lean construction takes many of the lessons and techniques used by Toyota and has adapted them for construction,” says Hunter.
He points to rail and water projects in Melbourne, some of which have hundreds of A3s – each an engineering or process problem that needed solving.
“It might be rolling out cable in a trench, using better delivery systems, how to better integrate the different organisations involved in the project.”
Delivery efficiency was a significant focus on Melbourne’s Regional Rail Link project. Hunter contributed across six packages of work, including taking a major role in the rail systems package, where delivery efficiency principles saved $24+ million.
“We used the Last Planner system to manage its complexity, as the rail packages interfaced with five others across different geographic areas. A process called ‘value stream mapping’ was used to reduce how long it took to prepare construction management plans by 50 person days.”
The benefits of being more efficient often revolve around time, cost, and quality, creating more certainty, earlier, and quickly capturing, transferring, and leveraging capability and learnings across a programme.
Hunter says delivery efficiency is best hard baked into the DNA of a project or programme from Day One. This happened successfully with Victoria’s Level Crossings Programme, after they applied lessons from Regional Rail Link.
“The Project Alliance Agreements (PAAs) for each of the five alliances working on the 110 level crossing removals include specific goals to encourage continuous improvement through innovation and knowledge sharing.”
A vision for NZ’s infrastructure future
To make delivery efficiency more of a focus in New Zealand infrastructure, Hunter suggests alliance or programme teams treat it as a must-do, and that, in most cases, the ‘client’ better define what success needs to look like.
“Defining this up-front and planning for continuous improvement will pay off; not planning for it will only guarantee more of the same.”
Hunter says, in Australia, the term ‘value for money’ comes up a lot. “We know when clients better define the specifics of what this looks like in their programme, it can make a real difference.
“Requiring certain methods to be used in project delivery – such as collaborative planning by the different organisations involved – is another useful thing to do. Microsoft has done this with its new data centre builds, with one of the major Australian data centres being delivered by Kapitol Construction in Melbourne who presented at a recent Lean Construction Association workshop.
“There needs to be a continuous improvement process as part of delivery models, with learnings ideally shared among other infrastructure programmes. This is more common in Australia, especially with level crossing removal alliances.”
While not a silver bullet for New Zealand, he says there should be more focus on delivery efficiency via continuous improvement.
Paraphrasing an Australian infrastructure CEO and friend, he says “ultimately, it’s about thinking about how we can be better tomorrow than we were today. If every person on a project or programme does that, we’re immediately on an efficiency journey, and that can only be good for people, project, and place.”
