From Design Office to Workface: One Production Flow

Construction often talks about design, procurement and construction as separate phases or functions.

Production does not experience them that way.

At the workface, a piece of work can only proceed when a chain of upstream conditions has been satisfied.

The design must be sufficiently mature. Decisions must have been made. Information must be released. Materials must be procured. Suppliers must have capacity. Fabrication must occur. Logistics must work. Access must be available. Predecessor work must be complete. The right people and equipment must be present.

The workface is simply where that entire chain becomes visible.

This changes how we should think about project flow.

A drawing waiting for approval is work in progress.

A procurement package waiting for design information is work in progress.

A fabricated component waiting in storage is inventory.

A crew waiting for access is unused capacity.

A decision queue is an information constraint.

Once we see the project this way, the artificial boundaries between departments become less useful.

The objective becomes the reliable flow of value through the whole system—from definition and design through supply and installation.

That does not eliminate specialist functions. It gives them a common production purpose.

Design should not simply maximise drawing output.

Procurement should not simply maximise purchase-order throughput.

Construction should not simply maximise labour utilisation.

Each function should contribute to the flow required by the system.

This is one of the ideas we are exploring in PPOS.

If projects are production systems, then information, decisions, materials and physical work need to be designed as connected flows.

The future project may therefore be managed less like a sequence of departmental handovers and more like an integrated production network.

That is a much harder problem.

It may also be the one worth solving.

We’re convening a small founding-project group to test this thinking on live projects—reach out if you’d like to be part of it.