Entries by Alison Clack

Design Work Planning for More Profitability

Marku Allison, the director of engagement and strategy at Chandos, walked the audience through the challenges of adopting lean construction methods to a project his team recently worked on. He said that construction tends to lump things into “done and “not done” categories, but there is more granularity to the process. Read more

Collaboration in the Big Room

Ken Melax, a Calgary-based engineer, said the ‘big room’ has the power to break down silos across a project. Cathy Hopkins, a continuous improvement specialist with NOvaTel Inc., said every implementation of a big room has its own unique characteristics, but there are certain consistencies. Read more

3P for Project Teams

Paul Blaser, the principal architect of RBM Architecture, began by explaining how he was tasked to help revamp the entire Saskatchewan health care system using lean construction principles. He said while touring hospitals he spotted building inefficiencies that slowed doctors down as they did their rounds, which drove design decisions for his firm when renovating […]

Target Value Design

Craig Webber, the principal of Group2 Architecture, elaborated on some of the tools used to enhance collaboration and communication between teams. He said that partner sessions commonly happen at the beginning of projects, but there is generally little follow up, which results in sliding back into traditional behaviours. Read more

“Is Our Industry Broken?” LCI-C Keynote

Construction, said Bill Black, the president and CEO of Brxton, comes with a long heritage, but added that with that comes habits. “There’s an incredible room for improvement, on multiple levels,” Black said. But he cautioned that there is a danger in looking at the situation as “glass half empty” rather than looking at ways […]

Lean Construction Maturity

Lean Construction (LC), a management philosophy, is known in the industry to enable organizations to achieve major improvement in terms of productivity and levels of innovation through more collaborative approaches. However, implementing LC is not an easy task for organizations and often requires fundamental changes at both – the strategic and operational level. Read more

CCA Releases a Report on the Quality of Documents Workshops

In 2015 CCA embarked on a series of “Quality of Documents” workshops across Canada to explore and discuss the issue of poor quality documentation, its potential causes, and, perhaps most importantly, potential solutions to address the issue. With the workshops now complete, CCA is pleased to publish a summary report of both the workshops and […]