Make Ready Planning (Lookahead)
A project may be spread over a long duration. The goals of Last Planner® System / Takt Planning is to shield the near term plans from the long term plans and to align near term plans with long term plans. Therefore, this option to Lookahead in vPlanner helps to isolate tasks that correspond to a shorter time interval and plan them precisely during the Make Ready Planning process.
The lookahead tool is a visual search that produces tasks that meet certain attribute criteria and fall within a certain window of time defined by the lookahead days. By default, tasks that have no milestone dates will not be part of the lookahead as vPlanner will have no way of identifying their priority. However, the Lookahead tool provides a number of overrides to include more than the minimum required tasks.
Lookahead Window
The Lookahead View serves a number of functions when vPlanner is used to support the Last Planner workflow:
Make Ready Planning (Lookahead Planning)
Use the Lookahead View with a longer lookahead duration (typically 40-60 days) to identify the tasks that should start or finish in the defined number of lookahead days.
Weekly Work Planning
The lookahead search can also be used to identify the minimum number of activities that should be on the weekly work plan. This could serve as the starting point to review tentative commitments and make sure the team is consuming the right amount of work each week to maintain the project's milestones. For daily workplans, set the Lookahead (days) to one day. For weekly workplans, set the Lookahead (days) to five days.