Keynote

[00:00:00] Gary Fischer, PE: So for our keynote, we’re privileged to have Todd Zabelle, who requires really little introduction author of Built To Fail, CEO of Strategic Project Solutions, and the founder of the Project Production Institute. He’s the leading edge thought leader in the world on all things related to production on capital projects.

[00:00:18] Gary Fischer, PE: Todd, over to you to get the ball rolling today.

[00:00:22] Todd R. Zabelle: Thanks Gary. As you said, looking forward to a exciting day and I think there’ll be lots of wonderful and insightful information that will be passed on by an incredible group of speakers that are basically on the ground and won’t be talking theoretical, titled Becoming Builders because I think we’ve lost our way in the past.

[00:00:51] Todd R. Zabelle: And, we’ll dig in that. As this, the keynote goes on. But where are we today? There’s lots of work, but overruns continue to be commonplace. It hasn’t really, in my opinion, become too public, but I believe that the majority of projects out there continue to be challenged. And by, by the not becoming public.

[00:01:13] Todd R. Zabelle: I’m, specifically talking about that work that’s happening in the digital infrastructure space. The industry continues. Committed to an ineffective practice. We’ll talk about that and some predictions on what happens next. But before we get started, I’d like to take a moment for those of you involved in the, project production management world to, recognize Lon Steinbeck. Unfortunately, Lon passed away. Last weekend on Saturday Lon had joined SPS in 2009 after a distinguished career for those of you involved in Lean in any way. Basically, Lon was the, first person in the US to undertake the implementation of lean and manufacturing at Honda Industries.

[00:02:01] Todd R. Zabelle: He worked directly with Shingijutsu, who were the three people that worked for Ohno at Toyota and did a tremendous amount of work in the area of supply chain optimization and OEM related supply for data centers and other technologies. Lon is now with the great production system in the sky, we wish him all the best.

[00:02:21] Todd R. Zabelle: We know he is looking down on us and probably looking, checking out the factories where, he is now. Again, a moment to, to think back about lon. Moving on. The global CapEx looks to be strong over the next several years. Continue to be growth. This is some information that I pulled from ChatGPT.

[00:02:47] Todd R. Zabelle: I decided to use a fair amount of of the AI applications for this presentation just to see what might happen. I think one of the observations that, that I can make personally. There’s a lot of people are using AI for routine work. I’m gonna show a couple applications that may not be routine even though you may not believe it or disagree with it, but but that’s for you to decide.

[00:03:10] Todd R. Zabelle: But anyways, we could see that the CapEx is going to remain strong. On the left we see a baseline or base case, and then on the right, a low and a high depending on what happens to ai. Interestingly enough though, if we take a look at this, energy’s still the main player and civil’s not far behind.

[00:03:27] Todd R. Zabelle: As a matter of fact, the investment in civil. For the most part, unless there is some kind of boom case scenario related to ai is supersedes digital and CapEx, right? So we can’t forget the importance of civil, the role of civil and the interconnection with civil with AI and and digital back with energy.

[00:03:52] Todd R. Zabelle: One thing I’ll say, having been fairly deeply involved in all this the last several years. Is, it’s important to understand that the CapEx four AI and digital and hyper is very concentrated. I dunno if everyone fully appreciates this, but even the companies on the left three of ’em are building for essentially anthropic or open AI when it comes to ai.

[00:04:15] Todd R. Zabelle: Obviously Google’s made some announcements on what they’re doing in their area, but this is a fairly closed loop with a small number of companies that are involved in this and. Pretty much everybody finds themselves in a value chain, whether you’re in Nvidia and Intel, Vertiv or Trane or Schneider, or you’re a contractor or you’re Colo provider it’s almost coming to the point now, if you look at this from an oil and gas perspective.

[00:04:44] Todd R. Zabelle: It’ll be interesting to see how the technology develops. The Microsoft, the Alphabets the, Amazons are almost contractors to the OpenAIs and Anthropics. So let’s see where that goes. It’ll be, interesting to watch. I. The challenge with associate with doing the digital infrastructure work to me, or it’s profound to understand why people can’t understand this.

[00:05:09] Todd R. Zabelle: We were able to present a paper, this particular paper back in data Cloud in Monaco in February, 2023. And we had predicted that various things were gonna happen and were happening, including this idea of access to power skilled labor. The. Increase in cost of capital and ongoing supply chain disruption.

[00:05:31] Todd R. Zabelle: This particular paper presentation started off talking about a request on supply chain disruption. And as we were putting the paper together we began to hear about power. This was before, and really realized power was an issue. Of course, we knew skilled labor was a problem and then capital. And during the session it was interesting to find out that the NIMBY thing had come into play.

[00:05:52] Todd R. Zabelle: Again, it wasn’t hard to, see this because in 2020 and having been involved in what we call the modern data center development going back to 2013 or whatever it was we knew that there were certain challenges that were gonna occur, but these challenges are not necessarily specific to data centers are specific to all types of large scale or major capital projects.

[00:06:22] Todd R. Zabelle: The interesting part of this seems to be, no matter what you do people seem so busy that they can’t accept or look to new ideas because they’re extremely busy. And I think in addition to the new ideas, there’s also new developments. This is all moving very rapidly, so we need new power.

[00:06:45] Todd R. Zabelle: And regardless of generation or transmission. Is what’s needed to deliver that power. And there’s a lot of debate around that. It all requires construction. And for some reason, when you get around people that are involved in digital infrastructure, for whatever reason, they don’t see this as a construction challenge.

[00:07:01] Todd R. Zabelle: I had someone who’s a very highly respected person in, the world of digital infrastructure. Tell me that it was interesting that they learned that safety’s actually the highest priority. And, I, it took me back saying, yeah, that, that makes sense. We’ve known that construction for decades, right?

[00:07:16] Todd R. Zabelle: Of course. That we’re a safety culture type industry. For obvious reasons. So there seems to be a lack of appreciation of what’s going on, and that construction is a very important element. We could even ask ourselves, do we need more power? Or by the time the power can be delivered.

[00:07:36] Todd R. Zabelle: Quantum computing changed the requirements for power. I was watching CNBC this morning and and Varney and the rest and they were going on about worse. New GPUs, new chips, new stuff coming out. Less power. Less power. Yeah. I believe by the time we attempt to build some of the power we need, again, whether it’s transmission or generation, other technical solutions are gonna be put in place to, to deal with this.

[00:08:01] Todd R. Zabelle: So going back to really three of these. Big factors that are happening across the board energy, digital, and civil all are suffering from supply chain disruption. Of course, the supply chain’s the same for all three, right? Schneider, ABB, Trane and the list goes on and on. They all supply to all those sectors.

[00:08:26] Todd R. Zabelle: There’s the continued lack of skilled labor that we’re hearing about, and then the ongoing cost and schedule overrun. So I just went through and did some research really quick. On the various AI platforms. I was actually running all three simultaneously Gemini Claude, and ChatGPT and wanted to see what was out there and thought it’d be interesting to, to do a deep dive, if you will.

[00:08:52] Todd R. Zabelle: And clearly at least from the perspective of Google, Gemini and the others, supply chain is a major issue, and specific areas of supply chain are various or of issue. But what I thought was fascinating is the recommendations that are included right now, the presentation be made available and you can, deep dive in this information, but the strategy here is to bake in the supply chain specific risk line items separate from the generic contingency.

[00:09:30] Todd R. Zabelle: And add five to 10% of cost, a three to six months schedule buffer for project heavy electrical exposure, but perhaps a smaller buffer for more basic civil work. Okay? So we continue, and as we know with the AI models, they just go back and, for the most part, reiterate what we already know, right?

[00:09:49] Todd R. Zabelle: So we need to add cost and time to buffer ourselves. I’m not certain if I am a company that’s in a competitive. Battle, for lack of a better word, for market penetration and hyper AI that I want to be patting my schedules due to electrical exposure. The same’s true in the AI battle, let’s say that’s going on between the east and the west, or China and the us and it’s partners.

[00:10:17] Todd R. Zabelle: We don’t really have the time that we can extend. To meet with these to accommodate these buffers or provide these buffers to deal with situations that can be addressed in different ways. And we’ll talk about that a little bit later. As a matter of fact, I believe if you tune into what Roberto Arbulu is gonna talk about, he is gonna talk about exactly that, right?

[00:10:38] Todd R. Zabelle: Labor forecast. In the US we need 439,000 workers. In the, in Europe talking about 1.2 million workers. Everybody’s saying that there’s, trouble finding qualified workers skill gap, right? People don’t want to join the industry and we continue to see skilled labor as a challenge.

[00:11:06] Todd R. Zabelle: ChatGPT tells us the same time, it tells us what specific trades might be important. And of course, electricians are in high need. However, if in the case of data centers or digital infrastructure. The GPUs that are now coming out require liquid to liquid in, in lieu of liquid to air. Maybe we need more pipe fitters, right?

[00:11:25] Todd R. Zabelle: So this is a dynamic ever changing scenario that has implications for people that are attempting to build digital infrastructure and other things. So we’ve got our supply chain contingency and if we’re going to deal with the labor situation, these lists of costs and schedules shown on this particular table provided by chat.

[00:11:50] Todd R. Zabelle: ChatGPT says that these are an addition to, all right what’s already being used. This is on top of the generic overrun rates you already see, quote unquote, of 20 or 30% on cost of 10 to 30% on time. So we’re, building up, as we can see here, quite interesting. Situation related to buffering and contingency.

[00:12:16] Todd R. Zabelle: I could tell you there’s projects in the UK where the contingency equals the project budget. So if the project budget’s 5 billion pounds, the contingency’s 5 billion pounds. So the total project’s now 10 billion. And there’s even legislation, I believe, and maybe Ed McCann there in the day can correct me if I’m wrong, where contingencies are now being dictated.

[00:12:39] Todd R. Zabelle: Ensure that projects can meet their costs and schedule. Alright so more about the labor shortage and why that’s an issue. Now the important question might be of what is how many workers and what type of workers are needed unprompted? Gemini had produced this and I thought this was absolutely fascinating and it automatically did a forecast.

[00:13:06] Todd R. Zabelle: That went from 2026 to 2035 and talked about things that I think is important, food for thought, and that is the availability of bodies that we might be concerned about in the upcoming year to the availability of technical skills, right? So clearly robotics are going to become more important. AI is already becoming more important.

[00:13:29] Todd R. Zabelle: Fastest growing trade electricians. I’d argue the pipe fitters are right behind, but we’re going to need solar and wind techs and robotic. Maintainers are people to maintain robots. We’re going to see an older workforce at the age of average age of 42. Interesting. That’s going to get into basically some of the gray beard sticking around and new younger talent coming in.

[00:13:55] Todd R. Zabelle: I thought this was really interesting focus on PPE training to focus on man machine separation protocols. Very common in manufacturing to figure out how close can a human worker get to a robot, right? And there’s a lot of effort put in that area with different means of protecting humans from robots and how they operate.

[00:14:20] Todd R. Zabelle: And this I thought was interesting. I don’t know if you believe this or not, but currently we’re about 85% stick built on site. And there’s a move to 40% modular. I would think that would be higher with all the discussion going on. But as, as you hear from Bob Snyder, from Binsky today there might be something to this number that might surprise you.

[00:14:44] Todd R. Zabelle: Perhaps moving the work off site isn’t all that cracked up to be cost and schedule overruns, this is all three clearly an issue basically. Almost everything of substance has a cost and schedule overrun 20 to 30% depending on what it is you’re doing. And so if you’re an owner, you’re going into the project pretty much being told that you’re going to have a cost and schedule overrun.

[00:15:17] Todd R. Zabelle: You need to plan for that. And we know that labor shortage is one of the contributor supply chains another. And then of course with things related to permitting, planning, permission planning, permission permitting, and the design itself. And how in some of the more, let’s call it advanced technological areas like data centers, the design is changing as you’re building, right?

[00:15:42] Todd R. Zabelle: So cost and schedule runs continue to be an issue along with the other ones. And these are a few that highlighting today, but I think we have to ask if there’s a deeper issue at play, right? Regardless of the results, right? What is astounding to me is there remains a commitment to the same outdated approach, and I would challenge anyone to say that there’s not a commitment to the outdated approach when you get to the boots on the ground, when you go to the construction site, in the fabrication shop or in the design office, and we do this all the time.

[00:16:14] Todd R. Zabelle: This is what we do in our business. This is where we hang out. All right? It doesn’t look any different. It has for many years. Sure. There’s people using Excel spreadsheets now instead of books to track deliveries and materials, track progress, and so on so forth. It’s absolutely asinine that we are operating and the way that we’re operating, building what we’re building

[00:16:42] Todd R. Zabelle: this approach. I think we have to go back to this. We’ve been talking about this for 10 years now. Was created at the beginning to the middle of the last century. I dunno if people fully appreciate this. What we do today was developed at the beginning and the middle of the last century. Decades ago, over a century ago.

[00:17:05] Todd R. Zabelle: A lot of what we do was developed 110 years ago. All of it is validated by underlying mental models and business models. So the business models I understand are difficult to deal with. That’s a situation where I don’t want to go outta business, and I may know what to do, but I can’t really do it because I put my business at risk.

[00:17:26] Todd R. Zabelle: However, the mental models are something that we have to break through. We have a belief system that just needs to be questioned. All right. We believe a trade-off exists between time, costs, scope, and quality. Even though every other industry has broken that I could tell you that’s a fallacy.

[00:17:45] Todd R. Zabelle: There is no reason to believe that it’s technically inaccurate. We prove it all the time. We believe we could predict what willl happen on a given day or week years in advance, right? We create critical path schedules and bar charts and Gantt charts predicting what’s gonna happen. I don’t know if you could predict what’s gonna happen.

[00:18:03] Todd R. Zabelle: Three days from now, we know that if we put on average 10 things on a plan, five get done the next day, and we’re looking to predict out years of time, what’s gonna happen within a week or a day it’s, absolutely outrageous. We believe this prediction can be used to measure progress and cost, right?

[00:18:22] Todd R. Zabelle: We believe getting more output per work will get the project completed faster. We go out and do time-on-tools studies. We look at, how hard people work in or ena of productivity through percent complete accounting. We believe we spent 80% of the budget. The project is 80% complete earned value as part of that.

[00:18:40] Todd R. Zabelle: And then we invest that. We believe that invest in psychology and sociology and creating better teams or more effective teams will resolve these problems, right? And the reality of the situation is it’s just not true, right? None of this is true. It’s crazy to think that it should be or could be, and why we continue to believe it is beyond me.

[00:19:01] Todd R. Zabelle: But the good news is, as you’re gonna hear today, there are people that are breaking these paradigms and moving on, right? And there are people that are leaders, right? Will Lichtig the father of the integrated form of agreement one of the leaders of the Lean construction movement, ed McCann, who you’re gonna hear from.

[00:19:22] Todd R. Zabelle: Bob Snyder, the guys at Petronas, one of the most respected oil and gas companies or energy companies in the world. And the list goes on about people that are highly respected and recognize people that I could tell you don’t believe in any of this, right? And we sit around and we talk about it, and we just shake our head.

[00:19:41] Todd R. Zabelle: If you could learn to not believe this and move on, lots of great things can happen. So we ask, and again, I’m going back in time. How did we get here? Basically there’s been three eras of how we think about projects, we’ll call it era one, the era of productivity led by primarily Taylor.

[00:20:07] Todd R. Zabelle: If you’re using bar charts, if you’re separating planning from doing, you have planners and you have craft people, you have designers, and you have people that make things and install things. You’re separating planning from doing right. If you have incentives that promote people to work harder, if you believe that if the workers work harder, it’ll get done faster, then you are deeply entrenched in the world of scientific management as developed by Taylor in 1913.

[00:20:39] Todd R. Zabelle: Okay. If you believe that there’s all sorts of things that connect in the behavioral aspects of humans you’re, rooted in the same time period in the behavioral approach. And if you spend a lot of time putting in administrative things, which to deal with all this chaos, then you’re deeply involved in what we might call the administrative management movement.

[00:21:00] Todd R. Zabelle: All right. A lot of that is still prevalent today, especially the thinking that if everyone works harder, we’ll get done faster. That’s a complete fallacy and completely inaccurate. The math tells us this. It’s not about working harder. As a matter of fact, if we get everybody working harder, if there’s any variability between the two people and a handoff is going to take longer.

[00:21:24] Todd R. Zabelle: All right? So I’ll allow others to dig in that today and stay a little bit clearer the technical. From beginning of 1950s until today, we move into the world of predictability because United States Department of Defense needed to go to Congress to do budgeting. They were looking for ways to understand where the costs and schedule for defense program stood.

[00:21:49] Todd R. Zabelle: And through that, a whole morass of administrative I don’t even, I don’t wanna use the word management, but I’ll use that. What’s become known today as defined by the Project Management Institute as project management, right? And this is entirely administrative stuff, focused on trying to understand what’s the cost, when are we gonna be done, and where are we in the process regard.

[00:22:15] Todd R. Zabelle: With regard to those two things that leads combined with era one, the movement to construction management, where. General contractors, and to a certain extent now, especially contractors, divest their equipment, shift risk to others and look to leverage outsourcing and offshoring and when possible work under different contracting models that do not allow them to be exposed to the risk.

[00:22:44] Todd R. Zabelle: All right. In the middle nineties to 2000, a group of us began to look at this world of production where really the focus is on profitability, right? We are still at the very early days. I’m personally disappointed at how far behind we are, but we are seeing progress. Today’s symposium is actually very interesting from the perspective that the contractors have now shown up.

[00:23:08] Todd R. Zabelle: We’ve been waiting for the contractors and they are now on the scene, and you’ll see that in today’s content, but. This is very much about projects as production systems schedules are not production systems. We’ll talk about that in a sec. And as the day goes on, more and more, operation science is the basis for understanding influencing projects, the application of automated, autonomous and robotic type production support, and the use of intelligent production, including AI/ML and so on and so forth.

[00:23:39] Todd R. Zabelle: All right. We need to move from this idea of bureaucracy. And it’s trying to get transparency into actually designing and controlling the production systems. All right, so moving on a little bit here. What will happen next? Clearly, knowledge work is being replaced by ai. That I just don’t think people fully understand that.

[00:24:06] Todd R. Zabelle: And what I mean, knowledge work, engineering and engineering of both the product and the process. The next frontier is autonomous and robotic. That’s coming at us, but even that I believe will be short-lived. I believe the future is with those that have the ability to design and create the systems that create the systems that manage production.

[00:24:27] Todd R. Zabelle: Now, good friend of ours in the UK likes to say the system is systems. I know it’s getting a little bit out there, but let’s just take the first one in ai. Quick little story. I plan to build an auxiliary dwelling unit. At the house here, and I had a architect, engineer friend of mine who’s done a lot of work with us through the years, do a sketch, merely a sketch.

[00:24:53] Todd R. Zabelle: This is it. This is the total design. Have nothing else. I was gonna do this live, but I did it in about 15 minutes this morning using ChatGPT, and I said, ChatGPT. Tell me how much it’s gonna cost and how long it would take to build this thing in the geography where I live. All right. Now I’ve talked with people about this and I said, look, I’ve had a friend come over who did some fabrication and he made a cabinet of stainless steel for outside.

[00:25:21] Todd R. Zabelle: And I said, mark, take a picture of that. Put it in ChatGPT and ask for bill of materials, work construction cost estimate, and then compare the cost estimate if you make it, versus if it’s made in China, locally versus China. And came back and almost fell off his chair and says 2% into what we price it and 2% of what our cost is.

[00:25:40] Todd R. Zabelle: The labor bigger and the duration was within a day or so, right? So I just took this out and I get people are gonna say we can’t really trust this. And even ChatGPT saying, don’t trust me, but I said, take that sketch flat thing on one page and create a structural design. And so I got a structural design.

[00:26:03] Todd R. Zabelle: I said, gimme the specifications to that, which it did. Okay. I said, gimme a bill of materials right now you gotta see here, probably can’t see this, but it says, thought for one minute, 35 seconds to get the bill of materials right? I said, gimme work instructions on what I need to go do. Okay? And this is important.

[00:26:30] Todd R. Zabelle: Because one of the things that we hear about out there when we try to build at SPS, at least, try to build production system models and simulations. People are saying, where do we get the data? Where do we get the data? And we began to understand people actually don’t know how to build anymore. And that’s why I’m proposing that we need to move from buyers to becoming builders again.

[00:26:49] Todd R. Zabelle: I think we lost the ability to build. I think that there’s a lot of people out there that are probably saying, what’s this guy talking about? But if you step back and you really think about what we’ve got going on here, it’s become a commercial transactional business with very few people that actually know how to build.

[00:27:03] Todd R. Zabelle: Today, you’re gonna hear about people that are on the front lines, actually building, all right, I asked for tooling equipment. Maybe I wanna make this stuff myself. I don’t know. I wanna get in the business. So it gives me the tooling and the equipment. Knowing a little bit about all this, right? Having been in the business for decades, I could say this is all fairly accurate.

[00:27:21] Todd R. Zabelle: All right. It also gave me a detailed task schedule, and this is for the structure specifically, right? And all this occurred in a very rapid amount of time, right? So I submit to you that anyone involved in knowledge work, especially in engineering, all right, needs to figure out what’s gonna happen next.

[00:27:49] Todd R. Zabelle: All right? You could say, and I agree that maybe this isn’t totally accurate. That’s where the AI training comes in. It will become accurate, there’s no doubt about that. And as the younger people come in the industry, they’re going to rely on this. Okay. So maybe there’s a place for people to check things, but I’m sure there’s a guy building AI, structural structures, AI based validation.

[00:28:18] Todd R. Zabelle: Tool right now, right? So the AI will make the design and then there’ll be something that’ll check it, right? And it’ll check with local codes wherever the case may be. So from a design engineering perspective I think we need to admit to the fact that one’s pretty much done. AI’s gonna take that over.

[00:28:35] Todd R. Zabelle: I would submit to you that at the end of the day, there might only be a handful of engineering companies in the world and they look like Microsoft, Amazon, Google. Perhaps anthropic, open ai, et cetera. Think about that. One of the things that we found most fascinating several months back is if you don’t flip the switch on ChatGPT, it goes in and queries your computer.

[00:29:04] Todd R. Zabelle: And so when you put a prompt in, it actually queries your computer and sends that back up to the data center to be part of the training model. So as long as that’s going on. I’m highly confident that this is all gonna become very accurate, very rapidly. If I go back and I look at that cost estimate that it gave me based on this sheet of paper, it’s within 50,000 of what I estimated the project was gonna be.

[00:29:31] Todd R. Zabelle: Okay? So how do we prepare for the future? I propose that the world’s gonna move from administration to production. I’m hearing daily that there’s companies out there trying to figure out how to use AI to, to manage the administration. It’s incredible. To me, we need to focus on the production, and you’re gonna see more of that today if we’re going to move to exoskeletons robotics, autonomous IoT, all these things are rooted in production.

[00:30:05] Todd R. Zabelle: They’re not rooted in administration. We need to, and this will be the theme of the day as people dig in this, we need to separate demand from the production system. Schedules are not production systems. We need to adopt what we call at PPI, the 4, 5, 3. Focus on the verbs, understand the levers, use the curves.

[00:30:27] Todd R. Zabelle: Okay. I think this is really important. We’ve got to come back to being builders where the focus is not on administration. I don’t know how many of you guys joined this industry, whether you’re on the owner side, the engineering design or construction fabrication side to do administration. Most people join this industry to design things, make things, move things around, and build things.

[00:30:53] Todd R. Zabelle: We need to get back to that. We need to move beyond this time, cost, trade off, and understand that we could do things in the design of the product, whether it’s the whole facility, the whole plant, the building, whatever the case may be, the railway down to how connections are made. Take in consideration how we do the work or the process design.

[00:31:16] Todd R. Zabelle: And that’s where I think people are moving. They’re moving from product design to process design, but in the maturity. There’s a whole area of what we call operation science that you’ll see today where we look at the relationship between capacity and its contributors inventory, both work in process, not progress, and stocks, and the implications and influence of variability and all that.

[00:31:37] Todd R. Zabelle: These five levers are the key to making projects not only not have cost and schedule overruns. Breakthroughs and performance that allow our customers or clients to get to market when they need to get to market.

[00:32:00] Todd R. Zabelle: We also need to get a fundamental understanding. I’m not gonna get in this because they will today of the relationship between driving utilization. If you try to make the workers work harder, alright, and you try to get utilization up, time is going to take longer. If you have too much WIP in the process, the project is going to take longer.

[00:32:25] Todd R. Zabelle: Think about that. Clearly. If we don’t have enough work going on, it’s gonna take longer, but if we have too much, it’s going to take longer and it’s going to tie up capacity. If you drag all the steel out to the site and you stage it. You need labor to do that and to manage that and to preserve that. Okay.

[00:32:51] Todd R. Zabelle: So we need to think through how are we investing the capacity utilization such that we don’t make it take longer? And there’ll be a lot of discussion on that today. And how do we manage or control WIP so we don’t make it take longer by having too little WIP or too much. As you can see on the far right curve, the greater the WIP, the longer it takes.

[00:33:17] Todd R. Zabelle: As a matter of fact, the only way to predict time, schedule, direct duration is to measure the WIP over time, and we’ll see some of that today as well. So what to go do next? I’d encourage you to listen deeply and engage in today’s session. All right. There’s going to be a tremendous amount. Of knowhow presented today by people that are on the front lines.

[00:33:45] Todd R. Zabelle: All right. There’ll also be knowhow and thinking from people that are working on the next generation of where all this is headed. Some of the top thinkers in the world, whether it’s Martin Fisher at Stanford, Ivan Damnjanovic Texas A&M, or Mark Spearman, the father of Operation Science, if you will, join PPI and explore the information, know how that’s made available on the site and through the group, right?

[00:34:10] Todd R. Zabelle: And then as Gary had said earlier, I would highly recommend you attend PPI educational programs, whether at Stanford or at Texas A&M. Everybody that’s gone there has said this is a life changing experience. And one last thing, as Gary said, read the book. Many of you are referenced in the book, the stories and the accomplishments that you’ve had have also been in the book.

[00:34:38] Todd R. Zabelle: So with that, I say thank you and hand it back to you, Gary.

[00:34:42] Gary Fischer, PE: Great. Wow. There’s a lot to think about packed into that that keynote and you did a great job of setting up the day. The thing that strikes me with all that is the future is coming a lot faster. That future state that Todd described is coming at us like a freight train.

[00:35:00] Gary Fischer, PE: Think about where we were a year ago versus where we are today. And it’s happening and it’s happening fast.