Lean construction researchers and practitioners have established a new paradigm for managing construction projects. This paradigm stems from insights gained by viewing project delivery as one kind of production and, inspired by the success of the Toyota Production System, leveraging Toyota's 'lean thinking' in the context of such one-of production. Premises of lean construction are that (1) production systems are riddled with variation, (2) variation can be good or bad, but most of it is bad, (3) most of this variation-good or bad-is self-inflicted; consequently 'lean' passionately promotes good- and relentlessly eradicates bad variation. This paper surveys a few of many lean construction means to manage variation. Lean thinking encompasses a lot more than thinking about variation, but that is the lens used here through which construction project management is viewed. Pairing these premises with lean variation-management tools may help readers broaden the insights they can gain from reading the lean construction literature.
Research for this paper was in part supported by gifts made to the Project Production Systems Laboratory (http://p2sl.berkeley.edu/). All support is gratefully acknowledged. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of contributors to the Project Production Systems Laboratory.