Overcoming Barriers to Adopting Lean Practices in the Construction Industry

An organization who starts implementing Lean are not able to sustain the implementation level and its slowly deteriorating due to various barriers at different levels. Intuitively we may feel that implementation of Lean Construction (LC) has got to do only with the inertia, but it is often more than that. As complex as a construction project already is, it gets even more difficult to manage numerous constraints for its success. Let us take an example where the project itself is “Implementing Lean Construction.” As a last planner, the lean champion needs to list down all the actionable steps for its implementation. Further, a constraint analysis for each of these activities would bring forward the hindrances of LC implementation. For past two years, we have been implementing Lean in our project sites and faced many issues while implementing them. We have been able to implement Lean in our construction projects by overcoming the various barriers. This chapter elaborates how the organization can tackle the various barriers and have strategic approach to tackle all the issues and improve the implementation level.