Workface planning and advanced work packaging

Look-aheads and constraint logs plan the work at the level of zones and trades. Workface planning goes one level further: it prepares, for each crew, a package containing everything the crew needs to do a defined piece of work in about a week, and it releases that package only when every item in it is ready. The idea came largely from heavy industrial construction, where crews on large plants were spending a large share of each day looking for drawings, materials, tools and permissions. It has since spread to buildings, infrastructure and institutional projects, often under the broader name advanced work packaging.

This lesson explains where workface planning came from, how its packages fit together, how a building contractor like Thornbury Builders can apply a lighter version on a project like Larkspur Commons, and what the evidence says about its benefits.

Origins: Alberta and CII

Workface planning grew out of work by owners and contractors building oil sands facilities in Alberta, Canada, in the mid-2000s, through the Construction Owners Association of Alberta (COAA). The model defined packages of work for each crew and the role of a dedicated workface planner who prepares them. The Construction Industry Institute (CII), based at the University of Texas at Austin, then studied the approach with COAA's involvement. CII research teams RT-272 and RT-319 broadened it into advanced work packaging, which links construction planning back into engineering and procurement, and in a 2015 report CII concluded that advanced work packaging should be treated as a standard best practice for industrial projects. (Dates and report numbers checked October 2026; specific benefit percentages are discussed below with caution.)

The core insight is simple. If a crew arrives at its work area and finds that something is missing, the crew either waits, works on something else inefficiently, or improvises. Studies of industrial sites found that crews often spent less than half of the day on direct installation work, with the rest lost to waiting, traveling, searching and rework. Workface planning tries to raise the share of direct work by making sure everything is ready before the crew starts.

The package hierarchy

Advanced work packaging divides the project into a hierarchy of packages that connects the overall construction plan to the work of individual crews.

The key idea is the path of construction: the planned order in which the construction work areas and packages will be built. Once the path of construction is set, engineering and procurement are asked to deliver their packages in that order, rather than in the order most convenient for them. On an industrial plant, that might mean the design team completes the pipe racks for one unit before starting the next unit, instead of designing all the pipe racks for the whole plant first. The result is that each construction work package can start with complete information and materials.

The installation work package

The installation work package is where workface planning meets the crew. A good IWP contains everything a foreman needs to plan and carry out a week of work without hunting for information.

• Scope: a clear description of the work and its boundaries, with the location marked on a plan.
• Drawings and details: only the current, approved sheets and details the crew needs, not the whole drawing set.
• Quantities and materials: a list of materials with quantities, where they are staged and confirmation that they are on site.
• Tools and equipment: lifts, specialty tools and any equipment bookings such as hoist time.
• Safety: the hazard assessment for the work, required permits, and any special precautions such as working near open shafts.
• Quality: the inspection and test requirements, hold points and acceptance criteria.
• Constraint check: a signed confirmation that all constraints were cleared before release.
• Labor estimate: the expected work-hours, so progress and productivity can be tracked.

The IWP is released to the foreman only when all its constraints are clear. Until then it stays in the workface planner's hands. A healthy project keeps a backlog of released IWPs, often around two to three weeks of work for each crew, so that crews never run out of ready work but packages are not prepared so far ahead that they go stale.

Sizing installation work packages

On Larkspur Commons, Dana decided to try a light version of workface planning for the drywall and the plumbing work, the two largest interior scopes. Mei acted as the workface planner, with help from the trades' own estimators. Her first job was to divide each scope into IWPs sized to about one crew-week, and to see how many weeks of released backlog the project could keep.

# Split the drywall board scope into crew-week IWPs and track released backlog (illustrative)
import math
zone_hours = {"L3W": 610, "L3E": 590, "L4W": 600, "L4E": 600,
              "L5W": 605, "L5E": 595, "L6W": 640, "L6E": 620}   # board work-hours per zone
crew, hours_per_day, days = 8, 8, 5
crew_week = crew * hours_per_day * days                        # 320 work-hours
iwps = []
for z, h in zone_hours.items():
    n = math.ceil(h / crew_week)
    for i in range(n):
        iwps.append((z, i + 1, round(h / n)))
print(f"Crew-week {crew_week} work-hours; {len(iwps)} IWPs; first five:",
      ", ".join(f"{z}-{i} ({h} h)" for z, i, h in iwps[:5]))
released = 6                                                   # IWPs released and ready today
crews = 2                                                      # board crews working in parallel
print(f"Released backlog: {released} IWPs = {released / crews:.1f} weeks for {crews} crews")
target_weeks = 2
print(f"Target {target_weeks} weeks -> keep at least {target_weeks * crews} IWPs released;"
      f" {'OK' if released >= target_weeks * crews else 'release more'}")

Crew-week 320 work-hours; 16 IWPs; first five: L3W-1 (305 h), L3W-2 (305 h), L3E-1 (295 h), L3E-2 (295 h), L4W-1 (300 h)
Released backlog: 6 IWPs = 3.0 weeks for 2 crews
Target 2 weeks -> keep at least 4 IWPs released; OK

Each zone splits into two IWPs of about 300 work-hours, close to one crew-week for an eight-person crew. With two board crews working in parallel, six released IWPs give three weeks of backlog, comfortably above Mei's two-week target. The plumbing scope, with smaller crews, splits into more and smaller IWPs.

The workface planner

On industrial projects the workface planner is a dedicated role, often filled by an experienced tradesperson or foreman who knows how the work is done. The planner prepares the IWPs, checks constraints, releases packages and tracks their completion, freeing the foreman to supervise the crew instead of chasing information. On large projects there may be one workface planner for every few foremen.

On a building of Larkspur Commons's size, a full-time workface planner for each trade is not affordable. Instead, Dana divided the role: Mei prepares the drawing and information side of each IWP and checks the design constraints; Omar confirms materials, hoist time and equipment; and the trade foreman adds the crew plan and the hazard assessment. The IWP is released at the weekly work plan meeting once all three have signed off. This shared approach captures much of the benefit at modest cost.

Applying advanced work packaging to buildings

Building projects differ from industrial ones in several ways that affect how workface planning is applied. Buildings have more trades with smaller scopes, more repetitive work and more design changes driven by tenants and owners. Their general contractors often subcontract almost all the work, so the crews being planned belong to other companies. And their schedules are shorter, which leaves less time to align engineering and procurement with the path of construction.

The building version is less formal, but the principle is the same: decide the order of construction first, align information and materials with that order, and release work to crews only when it is ready. Many building contractors find that the takt plan, the look-ahead and the constraint log already do much of this, and that adding installation work packages for the largest scopes is the step that brings the benefits to the crew level.

What the evidence says

Proponents of advanced work packaging cite large benefits: higher field productivity, lower total installed cost, better schedule predictability, fewer safety incidents and less rework. CII's research reports describe the improvements as substantial, and case studies published by owners and consultants often quote productivity gains in the range of roughly 10 to 25 percent. These figures should be treated with care. They come largely from industrial megaprojects, many from organizations that promote the method, and from projects that adopted several improvements at once, so it is hard to separate the effect of workface planning from that of better management in general.

A reasonable conclusion for a building superintendent is that the mechanism is sound, because crews that have everything they need do waste less time, and that the size of the benefit on any given project depends on how bad the starting point was and how well the method is applied. Measuring direct work time before and after, as Lesson 10 describes, is the best way to know whether it is working on your own site.

Common pitfalls

Workface planning can fail in several ways. Packages can become paperwork: thick binders that foremen never open because they repeat information the foremen already have. Packages can be released before they are truly ready, because of pressure to keep crews busy, which defeats the purpose. The path of construction can be ignored by engineering or procurement, so packages are always waiting for something. And the workface planner can become a bottleneck if the role is underresourced. Dana kept the Larkspur Commons IWPs to two or three pages plus the relevant drawings, and checked every few weeks with the foremen whether they found them useful.