Implementation of ‘Big Room’ at the URCC Project

‘Big Room’ is a collaborative planning room where all participants are gathered to discuss the project status and progress. In this study, the project involves the construction of a medical college building and associated development works at the academic campus for JIPMER in Karaikal.

Need for the study

This study aims to quantify the advantages and benefits of implementing the Big Room in construction projects. Practising conventional methods onsite could bring many challenges for the project team to successfully create a collaborative work culture.

However, Big Room, a powerful Lean concept, has helped the team overcome challenges in the weekly work planning in many ways:

To overcome ‘silo thinking’

To bring the ‘no blame culture’ within the project team

To build a dedicated and committed team by ‘keeping up the promises’ during Big Room meetings

To enhance the PPC (percent plan complete) through a collaborative planning process.

Methods:

Last Planner System (LPS), a collaborative planning system, consists of four stages of planning a project: master scheduling, phase scheduling, look-ahead planning and weekly work planning

The project team has implemented the Big Room concept at the project site to bring collaborative work culture and for better visual management

Collision space: The team has set up a collision space in the Big Room to brainstorm

The practice of visual management: This is followed to visualise project progress through commitment and PPC charts

Reward system: Based on the engineer’s PPC, rewards were given to encourage and motivate.

Results:

Following Big Room at project sites has helped the project team to improve the engineer’s PPC from 45 per cent to 80 per cent and resulted in a more reliable workflow.

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