Agile Construction is a way of doing business adapted to construction jobsites, born from agile manufacturing and project management, mostly used in manufacturing production and software developing teams.
Like the Toyota Production System, Agile construction is a system that relies on input from the source of the work information, both up front for planning the project, as well as throughout the life of a project for real-time customer feedback. The real-time input produces real-time measurements of productivity. It is an iterative and incremental method of managing the design and build activities.
This means that each time the process is repeated some changes are made to make the process better. Changes for the better are kept and for the worse are discarded.
Agile Construction is based on 7 principles or pillars:
- Labor productivity and measurement.
- Job scheduling and planning.
- Procurement management.
- Prefabrication (components or parts already assembled by the supplier, reducing time and complexity of the task).
- Reduction of labor composite rate (the cost of the worker to the company per unit of time).
- Estimation accuracy and improvement.
- Project financial management.
Agile Construction improves the contractor‘s ability to rapidly adapt to job site changes, minimizing the time between when a risk is detected and corrected.This requires a better mechanism to capture these changes and a better infrastructure for addressing them. Agile project management applied for construction can also make gains in pre-design and design phases of construction, and with a more highly trained and motivated work deliver a better consumer value.