We’ve covered getting the right foremen, understanding your phases, a foreman per phase, the meeting schedule, the conference room, the meetings themselves, finalizing your formats, and getting the system reviewed. The purpose of all of that is to implement zone control. It’s such a cool and important topic that I don’t think I could talk about it enough. The book Elevating Construction Foremen, or Elevating Construction Crew Leaders, has the details well articulated if you want more references.
Short answer: Zone control is where the rubber meets the road. Zone boundaries are the sidelines and takt time is the goalposts. Foremen and superintendents take the weekly work plan and zone maps into the field, finish and prepare, manage handoffs and the speed of the trade, never go slower than takt time, and only go faster when 100% finished and the next trade agrees.
How Does Zone Control Turn Foremen Into Zone Managers?
Zone control takes superintendents and foremen and turns them into zone managers. That’s the base definition of one-piece or one-process flow. You take your football game from a big open green field and add sidelines and goalposts. Your sidelines are your zone boundaries, and your goalposts are your takt time. Now every foreman and every superintendent supporting them knows how to play the game and how to win.
Patrick Lencioni says that to be engaged, everyone must feel relevant, connected personally, and like they can win on a daily basis, or it starts to feel hopeless. Zone control gives them that. See Zone Control: How to Manage the Speed of the Train.
Why Isn’t the Plan Enough?
Zone control is the implementation of the takt and Last Planner System in the field once your planning cycle is done. I love that the Last Planner System lets the trades make a plan with you, but it doesn’t matter if they don’t implement it. You’re probably tired of hearing me say it: knowledge is not power. Knowledge and action is power. The Last Planner System is not power. The Last Planner System with implemented zone control is power.
What Should Foremen Do Every Morning?
Now that your meetings take the plan all the way to crews prepping their day, and roadblocks are coming to the team, every foreman and superintendent should take out the weekly work plan with the zone maps, preferably front to back, and take them into the field. Get the crews heading in the right direction when they’re most prepared in the morning. Walk the job. Stop fighting fires and start finishing and preparing, finishing and preparing, looking for waste, unevenness, and overburden, and taking steps to fix them.
Throughout the day, based on where they see themselves within the zone and the takt time, foremen and superintendents take action to create flow and bring it back to the afternoon foreman huddle to plan the next day.
| Who | The zone control conversation |
|---|---|
| Superintendent with foremen | Let’s walk your zone. Are you finishing? Are you preparing to create flow? |
| Foreman with workers | What did we do yesterday? Are we finished? Let’s finish as we go. Where are we headed tomorrow? Let’s prepare to create flow. |
This gets foremen and superintendents out of the mindset of when are things going to happen, let me fight fires, and into managing the handoffs, the speed of the trade, the preparation of the next area, the finishing of where I am, the removal of roadblocks, and the root cause of any problems within those parameters.
What Are the Rules of Zone Control?
- Work by zones, painted on the floor so everyone can see them.
- Punch and finish as you go.
- Prepare work out ahead.
- Don’t go slower than your takt time within the zone you’re supposed to be in.
- Don’t go faster unless you’re 100% finished, everything is inspected and signed off, you’ve used your buffer to train your folks, you’ve prepared your next work, the next trade agrees, and it doesn’t overproduce.
Zone control is where the rubber meets the road. You’re taking all the planning and evaluating it within the boundaries. Read Last Planner in Construction: Zone Control for Flow.
Would You Coach Little Johnny’s Team Like This?
It would be really stupid to coach little Johnny’s or little Susan’s football or baseball team by saying, here’s what we want to do for the season, one, two, three, go. Or, here’s our plan for the next game, go. No. I’m not a coach, so let me know if I get any of this wrong, but you’d have the overall season huddle and opening meetings, practices, two-a-days if you’re in Texas, a plan for the next few games, a huddle before the bus, talks in the locker room before, during, and after, and coaching from the sidelines. If we wouldn’t coach a kids’ team like that, why would we build construction projects like that? We wouldn’t.
And even if you’re coaching, what good is a game without sidelines and goalposts? Even with all the huddles and meetings, if the team didn’t have sidelines and goalposts, they couldn’t play the game, and they couldn’t win. We might as well be throwing a ball around an open field. Texans spend a lot on their football fields. Being as fanatical as Texans are about football and not having sidelines and goalposts would be completely asinine. In construction, we need to spend a lot of time on takt time and zone boundaries.
What Comes Next?
When you find waste, unevenness, and overburden within those boundaries, you can do one of six things: level work, manage production, get the foremen and supers together, create stability, install a better quality product, and remove roadblocks. That’s the next episode. Then we get all trades into their wagons on their takt time as quickly and evenly as possible, begin reporting on progress, and help manage delays.
I told our Lean Takt people, whom I love, that I don’t care if we have a plan. I care if we get the plan into the field. I’m not interested in charging companies money for a pretty Excel sheet or schedule. I want results. I want the foremen, supers, and workers blessed in the field, and people going home safely to their families.
A listener who’s followed the podcast for about a year attended the two-hour free takt training we did. More content is coming on YouTube, and the channel is doing pretty well for construction.
So here is the challenge. Paint your zone boundaries on the floor, hand every foreman a weekly work plan with zone maps on the back, and walk one zone together tomorrow morning.
Bottom line: The Last Planner System with implemented zone control is power. Give your teams sidelines and goalposts.
If your project needs superintendent coaching, project support, or leadership development, Elevate Construction can help your field teams stabilize, schedule, and flow.
On we go.
Takt and Last Planner Implementation series:
Previous: Finalize Your Formats
Next: Six Takt Steering Strategies
FAQ
What is zone control in construction?
Zone control is the implementation of the takt and Last Planner System in the field. Zone boundaries are the sidelines and takt time is the goalposts, turning superintendents and foremen into zone managers who finish and prepare work within those parameters.
What are the rules of zone control?
Work by zones everyone can see painted on the floor. Punch and finish as you go. Prepare work ahead. Don’t go slower than takt time in your zone. Don’t go faster unless you’re 100% finished, everything is inspected and signed off, you’ve used your buffer to train your folks, you’ve prepared the next work, the next trade agrees, and it doesn’t overproduce.
How do foremen use the weekly work plan for zone control?
Every foreman and superintendent takes the weekly work plan with the zone maps on the back into the field each morning, walks the job, and stops fighting fires to start finishing and preparing, looking for waste, unevenness, and overburden and taking steps to fix them.
People Also Read:
Foreman Series: Zone Handoffs
How to Mark Logistics & Zone Maps
What Happens If Subcontractors Don’t Follow the Takt Plan?
Foreman Series: Operational Excellence
If you want to learn more we have:
-Takt Virtual Training: (Takt Virtual Training)
-Check out our YouTube channel for more info: (Elevate Construction on YouTube)
-Listen to the Elevate Construction podcast: (Elevate Construction Podcast)
-Check out our training programs and certifications: (Training Programs and Certifications)
-The Takt Book: (The Takt Book on Amazon)
Discover Jason’s Expertise:
Meet Jason Schroeder, the driving force behind Elevate Construction. As the company’s Founder and COO, he’s dedicated to taking construction to new heights. With a wealth of industry experience, he’s crafted the Field Engineer Boot Camp and Superintendent Boot Camp – intensive training programs engineered to cultivate top-tier leaders capable of steering their teams towards success. Jason’s vision? To expand his training initiatives across the nation, empowering construction firms to soar to unprecedented levels of excellence.