Delivering Certainty and Driving Better Outcomes Through Lean and Collaboration

Through this article, Jessica Spivey shares how Lean practices, systems thinking, and collaborative delivery models reshape construction outcomes. She highlights lessons from a pandemic-era higher education project, the importance of knowledge sharing across teams, and why aligning incentives through models like IPD leads to stronger projects and long-term client relationships.

Lean practices, systems thinking, and collaborative delivery models are reshaping construction outcomes. Drawing on lessons from a pandemic-era higher education project, I’ve seen firsthand how aligning teams, sharing knowledge, and adopting incentive-driven models like Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) leads to stronger results and lasting client partnerships.

Shaping Teams and Outcomes: A Systems Mindset

I’ve always been drawn to influencing not just the outcomes of individual projects, but the way teams think, plan, and work together. Complex higher education projects reinforced the value of systems thinking—seeing how design, construction, operations, and people intersect. When teams understand those connections, better results follow.

Lean in Action: Delivering Projects Ahead of Schedule

One standout example is the Brown University Sternlicht Residential Commons and Health + Wellness Center. We broke ground just as COVID-19 shut down campuses nationwide. Because it was a design-build project, design decisions and field execution had to move in parallel while teams rapidly shifted to virtual coordination.

Material shortages and workforce constraints could easily have derailed the schedule. Instead, Lean practices became our survival tool. Pull planning, daily huddles, milestone tracking, and transparent communication created rapid feedback loops, allowing us to re-sequence work in real time. Alignment across design, construction, and trade partners ensured the owner’s evolving priorities—particularly the need for single-occupancy dorms— remained central.

The result: workflows were compressed, inefficiencies eliminated, and the project was delivered one month ahead of schedule—during a pandemic, when most projects were facing delays. That success was only possible because of disciplined Lean practices.

Building a Lean Culture: Knowledge Over Checklists

At Shawmut, we define Lean as a culture, not a toolkit. It’s not about compliance or jargon—it’s about creating predictable outcomes and eliminating waste in every form: time, material, or energy. To reinforce that mindset, we:

• Integrate collaborative planning and scheduling into every project kickoff.

• Host “Lean Coffee Fridays,” where cross-functional groups—from Safety to VDC to Sustainability—apply Lean thinking to real project challenges.

• Use Root Cause Analysis to drive continuous improvement rather than assign blame.

Too often, valuable insights stay siloed within a single project team. We’ve worked to systematically transfer knowledge across projects so future teams can benefit from proven workflows—whether in prefabrication, coordination, or client engagement.

Rethinking Delivery Models: Collaboration That Aligns Incentives

Traditional design-bid-build can create silos, with designers, builders, and owners working sequentially and sometimes at odds. The misalignment, rework, and adversarial dynamics that result are all too familiar.

Collaborative Design-Build and IPD flip that model by aligning incentives, embedding transparency, and enabling decisions based on total project value rather than individual silos. These approaches are particularly powerful for institutional clients, offering cost and schedule certainty while opening the door to innovation—whether optimizing systems for lifecycle performance or accelerating occupancy through prefabrication.

At Shawmut, these models have delivered not only stronger projects, but also deeper, long-term relationships with clients and design partners.