5 Levels of the Last Planner System

Pull Planning Step by Step: Last Planner Made Simple

The Last Planner System is sometimes described as complex, but its underlying logic is as clear as the altitude metaphor that coaches Dan Fauchier and Dave Umstot use to introduce it. Looking out of a plane at thirty thousand feet, you see the broad shape of the landscape major milestones, overall sequence, the rough outline of a project. At ten thousand feet, you see more detail phases, handoffs, major constraints, the shape of each section of work. At a thousand feet, you can see individual activities and begin to see which of them are ready to execute and which have something blocking them. And at ground level, you see exactly what is happening right now, who is doing what, and whether the plan is being executed as committed.

The five levels of the Last Planner System correspond to this progression of altitude. Should, Can, Will, Did, Learn. Each level answers a different question at a different level of detail. And the system only produces what it is designed to produce predictable workflow, rapid learning, reliable commitments, and genuine collaboration when all five levels are operating together.

Level One: What Should Be Done

The first level operates at the highest altitude. Milestone planning for the entire project and phase planning for the next two months or so establishing the shared understanding of scope, major milestones, key constraints, and the logical sequence of work that will get the team from the project start to substantial completion.

The primary tool at this level is pull planning. Working backward from specific milestones, last planners the people who will actually make the assignments and execute the work build the sequence together. Each trade partner declares what they need from the preceding trade to begin their work, creating a chain of handoffs that clarifies the conditions of satisfaction for every major transition in the project. This process delivers bad news early the grey areas between contract scopes, the gaps in project scope, the coordination conflicts between trades while there is still time to explore solutions at the planning wall rather than in the field with crews already mobilized.

The goal of Level One is a shared understanding. Not just a schedule that has been communicated. A plan that the people executing it participated in creating, whose logic they understand, and whose commitments they made with genuine confidence rather than passive acceptance.

Level Two: What Can Be Done

The second level zooms in to the six-to-eight-week horizon the make-ready planning window in which the team actively screens every upcoming activity for constraints. This is the critical distinction between a look-ahead schedule and genuine make-ready planning. A look-ahead asks: is this task approximately scheduled to start in the next six weeks? Make-ready planning asks: is this task genuinely ready to execute, and if not, what needs to happen and by when to make it ready?

The eight flows of Lean construction provide the trigger categories for constraint screening: information, design, materials, labor, equipment, external conditions, space, and preceding work. Every upcoming activity is evaluated against each flow. Anything that is not fully cleared becomes a constraint that is logged with an owner and a last responsible moment the latest date by which the constraint must be removed for the task to proceed as planned. The constraint log is actively managed at every weekly meeting, not treated as a document that gets reviewed when there is time.

The principle at this level is straightforward: work that should be done is only added to the weekly work plan when it genuinely can be done. The discipline of making work ready before committing to it is what makes the weekly work plan reliable rather than aspirational.

Level Three: What Will Be Done

The weekly work plan evolves from the make-ready plan as activities are confirmed to be constraint-free. At this level, last planners make specific, reliable promises for the next two weeks of work. Not estimates, not hopes, not targets promises. The reliability of those promises is what makes the production system work.

There are five conditions for a reliable promise. The person making it has assessed their own competence for the task. They understand the conditions of satisfaction that define what done looks like. They have included realistic time for quality and safety requirements. They have confirmed that the required capacity is actually available and allocated. And they are aware of any unspoken conversations or competing commitments that might conflict with the promise. If any of these conditions cannot be confirmed, the answer must be no not a qualified yes, not a maybe, but an explicit no that triggers a path-clearing conversation.

Saying no to a commitment that cannot be reliably kept is not a failure. It is the most important thing Last Planner changes about how planning works. In traditional scheduling, the plan is built on optimistic commitments that nobody expected to push back on. In the Last Planner System, the plan is built on honest commitments from people who have thought carefully about whether they can actually do what they are promising. That honesty is what makes the Percent Promises Complete metric meaningful it measures genuine commitment reliability, not compliance with what the master schedule suggested.

The weekly work plan also includes a workable backlog a Plan B of tasks that are constraint-free and ready to execute if Plan A activities encounter new blockers during the week. This buffer of ready work is what makes the system resilient: when something unexpected stops a crew, they do not become idle or pull work out of sequence. They execute from the backlog while the constraint on Plan A is being resolved.

Level Four: What Was Done

The fourth level tracks the execution of the weekly work plan through the daily huddle and updates the commitment status in real time. When a last planner completes an activity, they mark it done. When the next trade or the site superintendent confirms the work is genuinely complete and ready for the next operation, it is marked done-done. The distinction matters because done-done is what actually releases the downstream work not done as the completing trade defines it, but done as the receiving trade needs it.

Percent Plan Complete is calculated at this level not as a performance judgment of individual trade partners but as a measurement of how well the system is working and how reliably the team is coordinating together. When commitments are missed, the reason for the missed commitment is logged against the activity, always from a system perspective rather than a blame perspective. Deming’s observation is the operating assumption: approximately 94 percent of the time, the system is at fault, not the individual. The reasons for missed commitment list reflects this bad planning, prior work not complete, design issue, materials not available, equipment not available, information not available all of them system conditions rather than individual character failures.

Here are the signals that Level Four is functioning correctly in a Last Planner implementation:

• The done-done standard is actually applied, not glossed over in favor of easier percent complete estimates
• Reasons for missed commitments are classified as system issues, not person issues
• PPC is trended over time and used to identify the categories of systemic failure most affecting the project
• The daily huddle produces real decisions and adjustments, not just status updates
• The distinction between Plan A and workable backlog is maintained and actively used

Level Five: What the Team Needs to Learn

The fifth level is where the system closes the loop and where most implementations fall short. Learning happens at every level of the Last Planner System, indicated in the schematic by arrows that point upward from each level to the levels above. Plus/delta at the end of every meeting. Takeaways from the daily huddle. Five-why analysis of the most significant reasons for missed commitment. Root cause analysis workshops for the issues with the greatest schedule impact.

The purpose of learning at this level is not to generate documents. It is to change the system conditions that produced the failures to take what was learned in Level Four and use it to make Level Three planning more reliable, Level Two constraint removal more thorough, and Level One phase planning more accurate. When the learning loop is functioning, each successive phase of the project starts from a higher floor than the previous one, and PPC improves over time rather than cycling at a steady state of acceptable mediocrity. The purple arrows in Ballard’s schematic are not decorative. They represent the mechanism by which the system improves itself. Without them, the Last Planner System produces a record of what happened. With them, it produces an organization that gets better at building.

At Elevate Construction and LeanTakt, all five levels of the Last Planner System are implemented together, integrated with the Takt production plan that provides the zone-by-zone sequencing context and the First Planner System that establishes the production design before mobilization. The system is only as strong as the discipline of the team running it. If your project needs superintendent coaching, project support, or leadership development, Elevate Construction can help your field teams stabilize, schedule, and flow. Should. Can. Will. Did. Learn. Five levels. One system. Run it all.

On we go.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the five levels of the Last Planner System?

Should what should be done, established through milestone and phase planning. Can what can be done, established through make-ready planning and constraint removal. Will what will be done, established through the reliable weekly work plan. Did what was actually done, tracked through daily huddles and PPC. Learn what the team needs to learn from misses to improve the system.

What is the difference between a look-ahead schedule and make-ready planning?

A look-ahead schedule identifies what activities are coming up. Make-ready planning actively screens each of those activities for constraints using the eight flows of Lean construction information, design, materials, labor, equipment, external conditions, space, and preceding work and assigns ownership and deadlines for removing anything that is not clear.

Why must last planners say no when they cannot make a reliable promise?

Because a yes that is not backed by genuine confidence in meeting the five conditions for a reliable promise is not a commitment it is an optimistic guess. And optimistic guesses are what produce the pattern of consistently missed weekly work plan targets that most projects accept as normal. The no that triggers a path-clearing conversation is more valuable than the yes that obscures a constraint.

What is done-done and why does it matter?

Done as the completing trade defines it means the work is finished from their perspective. Done-done means the work has been confirmed as complete and acceptable by the receiving trade the next person in the sequence who depends on that work being correct. Done-done is what actually releases downstream work and reduces rework.

Why does the Last Planner System need a qualified coach to implement?

Because the first exposure a team receives to any new system is the one that shapes their relationship with it. A poor initial implementation one that skips levels, applies partial elements, or misses the commitment reliability discipline produces a team that has experienced LPS as something that does not work, which is much harder to correct than starting from no experience at all.