S8E179: Valuing the Project Timeline with Ali Mafi

Ali Mafi

Managing Director at LTL - Timist™

I started on-site as an engineer in Terminal 4 in 1980. I worked my way up to the project management role and, after two projects, decided how projects worked wasn't for me. Nothing seemed to work and I felt that it wasn’t intellectually engaging. It was all chasing sub-contractors and engaging in energy-sapping toxic behaviours such as blaming and defensive reasoning. I left construction to do an MBA and then worked at a large automotive company looking at life cycle cost and productivity. It was during this period that I discovered an environment where things worked. The right colour door arrived at the right colour car every time. I came back to construction and joined Balfour Beatty Civils and Rail major projects. Early on, I was asked, based on my automotive experience and MBA, to join the Business Improvement Team (BIT) which was probably the first of its kind in construction. The BIT was made up of 5 of the smartest people I have met in construction. We then spent 6 years testing out everything and anything we read or heard about. We started with implementing TQM before Lean Thinking. We helped Eli Goldratt with his first trial of Critical Chain. We met Gelen Ballard soon after his Last Planner paper was published. We tested out ideas from Semco and Riccardo Semler, setting up self-managing front-line teams on major projects. In 1999, I was seconded to Egan’s M4I (backed by the cabinet office) as an innovation advisor. I helped develop the Construction National KPIs, promote offsite manufacturing, and encourage the use of partnering PPC2000 forms of contract. I also set up and ran the first Lean Thinking training workshops in construction. I was also responsible for validating the innovations claimed by the 68 Egan complaint demonstration projects and producing the ministerial report for the parliament. in 2004 i helped set up Lean Thinking Ltd and became a member of Buildoffsite. At a later date, I supported the first BIM trial project. I have been involved with more than 200 projects and have experimented with more ideas, tools, techniques, initiatives, etc, on more live projects for a longer period than probably anyone else in the industry globally. I was invited to join the Productivity Insights Network (PIN) a few years ago. The aim of PIN was to deepen the understanding of the factors influencing UK productivity (all industries). The network involved nine top UK universities. In the last few years, utilising the learning from experimenting with most initiatives, tools and techniques, I have developed the Timist™ project delivery system, which is focused on delivering projects in the shortest time than any other current system. It achieves this by: \- Functions like a sat nav and gives time to completion daily. \- Measures productivity and client value in flight daily. \- Organises work one unit by one unit (number, length, area, volume) and executes continuously rather than based on task times. \- Prioritises work scientifically daily using elapsed time in the order of impact on the end date. \- Doesn’t allow one-to-one meetings by the tier 1 and the subcontractors to discuss progress. \- Deals with the biggest risk on projects the same way as playing Tetris. \- Emulates the hospitals' daily ward rounds system as the best way to improve productivity.