Legos and DFOWs: The Basic Building Blocks
Definable Features of Work are the Legos for construction.
I recently finished How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, From Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything in Between. It gave me a better way to articulate what I was trying to say in my earlier articles about using Definable Features of Work to organize our projects: Definable Features of Work are the Legos for construction.
Quality Needs to Scale
The problem with quality is that it doesn’t scale. The administrative effort required for the modern quality process is the same regardless of project size and complexity. Solving this scalability problem requires that we think differently about how we organize our projects.
DFOWs are the Legos for Construction
The authors talk about breaking one specific project down into repeatable chunks:
“What is your basic building block, the thing we will repeatedly make, becoming smarter and better each time we do so?” (168)
With DFOWs, I’m taking this idea and applying within one project and across projects. If we think about building envelopes or central plants as Definable Features of Work, those can be our Legos. Learnings from the previous central plant can be applied to the next project. And the next. And so on. This solves the industry’s lessons learned problem.
“Learning from the delivery of one section [DFOW] can be applied to another […].” (172)
Breaking Down the Entire Project into DFOWs
If a project is correctly broken up into DFOWs, everything will fall under a DFOW. The art of figuring out what your DFOWs are – the Legos, the basic building blocks for the project – requires planning and critical thinking. Data from How Big Things Get Done illustrates that if we don’t plan the work, we give ourselves a 20% chance of success (140).
Use the Same Lego
Teams in design, preconstruction, and construction organize their work differently. This is why collaboration is so difficult. We speak differently – with different Legos, to use the language from the book. This is why there are coordination problems and missing information at handoffs between each project phase. If every stakeholder in a project, from development to operations, thought about the project in the same basic building blocks, we could resolve many of our communication and coordination problems.
DFOWs should be the universal language of quality – the Lego for the industry. That is how we create scalable quality.
This article was originally posted on the Deconstrategy blog.