Last Planner
System

A distribution-post build or a line rebuild runs for weeks, touches multiple crews, and depends on materials, permits, and other trades finishing first. The instinct is to draw one master schedule up front and push dates down to whoever's doing the work. In practice that schedule is built by someone who isn't on site next Tuesday, gets stale within days, and nobody re-plans it until it's already wrong.

Last Planner inverts who gets to promise: work only enters next week's plan once it's genuinely ready to start — no missing material, no missing permit, no unfinished predecessor — and the person actually doing it is the one who commits to it. The schedule stops being a document someone hands down and becomes something the crew builds a week at a time, together.

The look-ahead and the constraint log are the same conversation from two sides. Anything not yet ready in the look-ahead has a reason why — and that reason lives as its own row in the constraint register, with an owner and a concrete action to clear it, not just a status. An item only flips to ready — and only then becomes promisable — once every constraint tied to it is gone.

There's no separate project schedule to keep in sync. The timeline below is generated directly from the milestones, look-ahead items, open constraints, and weekly promises already entered — milestones plot as diamonds on their due date, look-ahead work as bars colored by ready/blocked, open constraints as markers, and weekly promises as dots colored by outcome. Add a row anywhere in the five conversations and the chart already has it; there's nothing else to update.