Agile Construction is an integrated system of principles and methods, and a philosophy of doing business adapted to jobsites and overall project delivery in the construction industry. It is born from agile manufacturing and project management, which is mostly used in manufacturing production, automotive and software developing teams. It is the application of the Toyota Production System to the construction industry, with two parallel paths: Measuring and improving productivity, as well as segregating and Externalizing Work throughprefabrication and supply chain management. Like the Toyota Production System, Agile Construction principles form is a system that relies on input from the source of the work information, both up front for planning the project, as well as throughout the life of a project for real-time feedback. The real-time input produces real-time measurements of productivity and allows for improved responsiveness to changes on the jobsite. Iterative and incremental Agile Construction methods help manage the design and build of efficient, low-risk processes and activities. This means that each time a process is repeated some changes are made to improve the process. Changes for the better are kept and for the worse are discarded. The 8 Agile Construction principles are:
Agile Construction principles help contractor's to make processes visible, measurable and manageable to improve the ability to rapidly adapt to job site changes, by minimizing the time between when a risk is detected and when it gets corrected. This requires a better mechanism to predict and capture these changes accompanied with a better infrastructure for addressing them. Agile Construction project management can also make gains in pre-design and design phases of construction projects. Accompanied with a well-trained and highly motivated workforce, companies using Agile Construction operations are able to increase responsiveness and productivity, to reduce cost and to deliver a better customer value.
