Lean, AWP, and PPM share one origin and push in uncoordinated directions. John Strickland of Collaborative Flow presented Advanced Project Delivery as the reconnection. APD is a forum, not a merger: each institute keeps its mission while the three learn from each other and combine their influence.
Strickland traced the fifteen-year divergence: lean construction began from the tenet that projects are production systems, its planning practices fed Alberta’s workface planning, which became Advanced Work Packaging, and PPI formed to refocus on the original tenet through Operations Science. Strickland’s image is an industry that took a contractual approach generations ago and now sits up to its axles in mud, with well-intentioned institutions pushing without coordinating the push. The foundations, a deliberately non-definitive list, include early engagement and aligned commercial interests, robust production system design and WIP control, respect for human factors, distributed decisions and governance, removal of field constraints, coordinated supply chains, and rapid scope validation.
Individual paradigms change readily, Strickland argued; institutional ones do not, so “we’re going to need institutions to challenge institutional paradigms.” Strickland announced the CII-sponsored Advanced Project Delivery Association, meeting first in November. In the closing exchange, James Choo noted customers already ask whether AWP is compatible with PPM; whether the institutes answer with one voice is now the test.
John Strickland has been a pioneer in bringing innovative thinking to the Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) industry with passion for workplace safety, learning, innovation and creating smooth flow based on Lean project delivery principles. His background includes many years of jobsite and corporate construction operations leadership c ...
For more than three decades, the capital projects industry has pursued improvement through many initiatives and movements, including Lean Construction, Project Production Management (PPM), and Advanced Work Packaging (AWP). Each emerged to address persistent problems, each has demonstrated success, and each has built a passionate community of practitioners.
Yet despite these efforts, the industry continues to be frustrated by cost overruns, schedule slippage, late engineering, procurement misalignment, and unpredictable construction flow at a time when resolving these problems is critical. The problem is not a lack of intelligence, effort, or innovation. Many factors contribute, but fragmentation and outdated paradigms are among the most significant.
Lean, PPM, and AWP share common origins but have evolved independently, with different perspectives on the root causes of project challenges. As a result, they have generally operated in parallel rather than in concert — sometimes reinforcing one another, sometimes working at cross-purposes, and too often failing to produce the unified, system-level improvement the industry needs.
The industry has been pushing hard on multiple fronts, but not always in the same direction.
Many practitioners have lived a familiar pattern: Lean, PPM, or AWP is introduced on a project; the team embraces it; performance improves; and for a moment it feels like the industry is finally moving forward. Then the project ends, leadership changes, or corporate strategy shifts — and the next project falls back into familiar habits.
The experience resembles trying to free a car stuck in the mud. You push hard and the car moves forward a bit before sliding back. You push again, and again it moves — a little more this time — before rolling back once more. The motion is frustrating, but it is not failure. It is simply a system that has not yet found traction.
Lean, PPM, and AWP have each given the industry powerful pushes. They have moved the car forward, but because they evolved independently — with different assumptions, vocabularies, and points of control — they have not been pushing in the same direction or with coordinated timing.
APD was formed to change that dynamic.
Lean, PPM, and AWP evolved from a common set of ideas. Each was created to address persistent failures in capital project delivery, but they developed independently and focused on different, and very real, problem areas. Despite shared intent and overlapping principles, the three movements have not fully recognized what they could learn from one another.
Lean recognizes workflow and operational design but does not fully leverage Operations Science. Although make-ready planning has always been part of the Last Planner® system but during a breakout session at a recent LCI Congress heard numerous references to inadequate make-ready planning as a prime example of “fake Lean”. The AWP community has put a lot of effort into constraint removal that might add rigor and discipline. PPM brings deep insight into production-system behavior but does not fully incorporate the human-centered practices refined by Lean or acknowledge the contributions of Workface Planning. AWP is dedicated to producing constraint-free work for the field but does not address production science factors that degrade performance and is often deployed within contracting structures that limit the benefits of Lean and PPM.
All three would benefit from a structured validation process that stabilizes Scope early and enables earlier, more effective construction influence.
Instead of treating Lean, PPM, and AWP as competing schools of thought, APD extracts the methods each use and combines them into a powerful production-based project delivery framework. While APD is an emerging approach, it generally embraces the following ideas:
APD is not another push. It is the mechanism that aligns insights and efforts, so the rocking motion produces sustained forward movement.
The APD journey began several years ago with a discussion about whether it might be possible to reconcile AWP with Lean Construction — something that seemed very unlikely at the time. A Joint Working Group was formed in 2020, supported primarily by the Construction Industry Institute, to engage a group of forward-thinking practitioners in a broader discussion. We uncovered enough common ground to warrant further development, particularly related to the type of culture we should be fostering.
We introduced key Lean and PPM ideas in dozens of webinars and presentations to those with AWP backgrounds and found that nobody was arguing with us — they were open to the ideas we were sharing. We next engaged the leadership of the Project Production Institute and were pleased when they offered to let us address their membership and joined us in numerous presentations to promote the concepts.
A core team from PTAG, Garner Distributed Workflow, and PPI has presented the APD message in dozens of webinars and industry conferences to a positive response. These ideas are gaining momentum as we make a coordinated push to move the industry forward.
A new organization, the Advanced Project Delivery Association, has been formed — not to displace LCI, PPI, or CII, but to create a new forum. Perhaps readers will take interest and join the discussion.
Take a moment to think about a project that went seriously off the rails. Was failure to fully comprehend the Scope — or misalignment on Scope — a major contributing factor, or even the root cause? That has been my observation across many projects that is probably shared by many readers. Inadequate Scope definition can be thought of as a defect in the project production process. And like any other defect, the earlier it is discovered, the less chaos it will create.
This is why APD includes an enhanced focus on Scope and Cost Validation, going beyond prevailing practices, to establish Scope and Conditions of SatisfactionThis idea is discussed in more detail in a previous paper prepared for PPI, Launching Projects Without the Big Waste.
APD does not replace Lean, PPM, or AWP. It provides alignment that allows them to complement one another. Each of these approaches contributes valuable insights, but they evolved independently and were never designed to interlock. APD supplies the operating system that lets their strengths reinforce rather than compete.
The real value of innovation emerges when ideas are brought together to create something new. That is the purpose of APD: not to replace existing methods, but to combine them in ways that unlock capabilities none of them could achieve alone.
A more comprehensive, technically detailed version of this paper — including production-system mechanics, Rapid Validation workflows, and case studies — is in development for readers seeking deeper insight.