Best way to get buy-in from your crew

While push-planning starts with a Gantt chart from the top, pull-planning focuses on frontline buy-in.

Have you noticed? Commanding people to do something and setting a deadline, dismissing all concerns and excuses, often results in deadlines being missed. Yelling on the phone is bad, but yelling in an email is even worse.

The best way is to get buy-in is actually to call a site meeting, get all inter-dependent trades together, highlight a milestone, and ask the crew what they think needs to be done to reach that milestone, and how long they need to do it. This kicks off the real communication.

"Why do you need a whole week to do this? I've seen this kind of job get done in 2 days."

"Well we may have bad weather this week and my work is dependent on this guy finishing his job."

"When are you gonna be done with yours?" asking the other trade.

"I can be done by Wednesday."

We then start to reveal all dependencies, be it human or non-human factors, and start to get a clearer idea on the flow of work for this stage.

If this flow of work can be clearly visualized on a wall chart, we have incepted an agreement in everybody's mind, because what we're seeing on the wall is not one person's demands, but a result of everyone's input.