Understanding integrality to support multi-skilled, autonomous teams in complex construction projects
Description
Given the right conditions, autonomous, multiskilled work teams can operate like mobile production cells, completing multiple operations with enhanced stability, predictability and quality. The expected gains resemble those sought-after by builders and subcontractors that apply organizational-level best practices, such as design-build and partnering, to perform a larger scope of activities. The similarities between the benefits suggest that there must be common patterns behind the successful renewal initiatives applied in the construction sector, both at operational and organizational levels. Hence, this paper characterizes the mobile cell construct as part of an integral production model devised to cope with complexity in projects and proposes an understanding of its enablers by exploring recurrent patterns in production strategies and practices. A literature review on systems thinking approaches and well-tried organizational-level initiatives was conducted to formulate a theoretical framework of integrality objectives and patterns for project production systems. This was followed by a multiple-case study of design-build firms, using site visits and semi-structured interviews to verify the emergence of such patterns through lean practices supporting autonomous teams. The research reveals that the strategies and practices promote four interrelated integrality patterns, which improve systemic stability by either reducing potentially harmful events or by attenuating nonlinearities within dynamics arising from them. The results show team autonomy as an emergent property of integral production systems. The consistent patterns identified serve not only to comprehend the integral production discipline, but also to characterize the building blocks of the mobile cell construct for its implementation under different contingency factors.