Planning That Works – Takt Production System® for Students

Why Your Lookaheads and Weekly Work Plans Keep Failing (And the Filter Rule That Fixes Both)

Here’s the mistake that wastes coordination time in most Last Planner implementations: creating lookahead plans and weekly work plans from scratch every cycle instead of filtering them from your production plan. You gather trades in the trade partner weekly tactical meeting. You ask what work is coming in the next six weeks. You write down activities. You ask what’s happening next week. You document commitments. And you’re recreating coordination work you already completed during pull planning. The lookahead you just built from whole cloth isn’t aligned to your production plan’s trade flow. The weekly work plan you just created doesn’t preserve the handoffs you validated during pull planning. You’re doing overprocessing and rework every single week, burning meeting time that should be spent finding and removing roadblocks instead of recreating plans.

Here’s what actually works when you implement lookahead and weekly work planning correctly. Both plans filter directly from your production plan not created from scratch. In your trade partner weekly tactical meeting (I like Tuesday afternoons), you export the six-week lookahead showing the work already coordinated in pull planning. You set a timer for five to ten minutes. Trade partners use the 17-point make-ready checklist to verify their activities are ready six weeks out. Anything not on track becomes a roadblock that gets marked and solved. Then you review the weekly work plan filtered from the production plan showing one to two weeks out with activities broken out by day and handoffs marked. You coordinate adjustments as needed, but you’re not recreating the sequence you’re refining an already-validated plan. This approach respects the coordination work already completed while enabling trade ownership of tactical execution through filtered views that maintain vertical alignment to milestones and diagonal trade flow across zones.

When Coordination Becomes Recreating Work You Already Did

The real construction pain here is running weekly coordination meetings that burn hours recreating plans instead of spending that time removing the roadblocks those plans reveal. You don’t have your production plan accessible in the meeting. You ask trades to tell you what work is coming. They try to remember what was discussed in pull planning three months ago. You write down activities that may or may not match the production plan sequence. You ask about handoffs. Trades describe coordination that may or may not align with what was validated during pull planning. By the end of the meeting, you have a lookahead and weekly work plan that are disconnected from your production plan, misaligned to milestones, and missing the trade flow validation you already completed.

The pain compounds when you repeat this process every single week. Week one, you recreate plans from memory. Week two, you recreate slightly different plans because memory is unreliable. Week ten, your weekly coordination has drifted so far from your production plan that you’re essentially running a different project than what was pull planned. The production plan showed 11 zones with specific handoff sequences. Your weekly work plans show random groupings of activities with handoffs you made up in meetings. And you wonder why execution keeps failing when your weekly coordination isn’t even aligned to the production plan you spent weeks creating.

The Pattern That Wastes Coordination Time Every Week

The failure pattern is treating lookaheads and weekly work plans as standalone documents instead of recognizing they’re filtered views of production plans that already exist. We think coordination meetings exist to create plans. We gather trades and build lookaheads from scratch. We construct weekly work plans from whole cloth. And we miss that the planning work was already done during pull planning. The production plan already has the sequence, the trade flow, the zone organization, and the handoffs. Lookaheads and weekly work plans don’t need to recreate that work they need to filter it into appropriate time horizons and verify work is ready.

What actually happens is we waste meeting time on overprocessing. Instead of spending five minutes filtering a lookahead and fifty-five minutes removing roadblocks, we spend thirty minutes recreating a lookahead from memory and thirty minutes discussing roadblocks without time to solve them. Instead of spending ten minutes filtering a weekly work plan and twenty minutes coordinating handoffs, we spend twenty-five minutes reconstructing the weekly work plan and five minutes rushing through handoff coordination. The time allocation is backward. We burn coordination capacity on recreating plans instead of using it to make those plans executable.

Understanding Where Lookaheads and Weekly Work Plans Fit

Let me show you how lookahead planning and weekly work planning fit in the complete planning hierarchy and meeting structure. These activities happen in the trade partner weekly tactical meeting. In the book Takt Steering & Control now available in English and Spanish you’ll find the actual rundown of how you go through that meeting and do these two very specific tasks.

Here’s the trade partner weekly tactical agenda: shout-outs, lightning round, safety topic, review the macro-level Takt plan, review last week and current progress, create weekly work plan (this is actually part of this meeting), and do lookahead planning with your six-week make-ready lookahead. This can be four weeks or five weeks both are fine. The bottom line is lookahead and weekly work planning are the main focus of this meeting agenda.

The meeting takes place in the trailer or conference room. You’ll do your weekly team meeting for balancing and building the team. You’ll do your strategic planning and procurement meeting where you review the macro-level Takt plan and ensure procurement is aligned. Then you’ll do your trade partner weekly tactical right here inside the office. Then the afternoon foreman huddle in the office. When you go to the morning worker huddle, you’re out in the field. Area boards communicate information for specific areas. Crew boards are for individual crews.

Conference Room Setup for Effective Coordination

For the conference room layout and I don’t like single-wide trailers, I hope you have at least a double-wide or larger, but it does fit into single-wide trailers and we can help you with that if needed here’s the setup that enables effective lookahead and weekly work planning:

Conference Room Layout Components

• Left Wall: Part one shows coverage, team, and focus boards. Part two shows flow and weekly work plan deliveries board. This is where trade partners put red magnets marking roadblocks before and during the meeting.
• Front of Room: Discuss-and-solve boards and two screens mounted for visibility. Left screen typically shows the lookahead or weekly work plan. Right screen shows supporting visuals like building information model, logistics plan, procurement log, or zone maps.
• Right Wall: Pull planning area and agendas posted. You’ll see the trade partner weekly tactical agenda displayed here so everyone knows the meeting flow and what’s being covered.

This layout supports the meeting flow where roadblocks get marked on left wall boards, plans get displayed on front screens, and problem-solving happens collaboratively using the discuss-and-solve boards and whiteboards for working through solutions.

How Filtering Works in InTakt (Or Excel Templates)

Let me show you how this works in practice using InTakt software. After you’ve created your macro-level Takt plan and done the pull plan that optimized that macro phase into a norm-level production plan, you’re ready to filter lookaheads and weekly work plans. Inside the production plan, you can zoom in and out and manage everything. Then you simply go to export and you can export the lookahead plan. Click on or off any phases you want or don’t want and isolate that down.

Let’s look at a specific activity maybe wagon 56 for shear walls, or A1 for air and vapor barrier work. How can we make this ready in the next three, four, five, or six weeks? I love the filter that shows you different durations. I personally love the six-week lookahead. And I love that we have access to the zone maps below. The idea is to use this filter to make work ready. It should come directly from the production plan.

Now let me export a weekly work plan. I love this because you can highlight any phases you want and look out just one week or the next two weeks. It breaks out every activity into individual lines. Then the little handshake symbol shows where the handoffs are. One of the things I love is if you use the work plan function in InTakt and add subtasks, they will show up here for you to coordinate as part of your weekly work plan in your trade partner weekly tactical. This is absolutely remarkable.

If you don’t have InTakt, we do have free templates at elevateconstruction.com. Go to resources and down to Excel you’ll want the norm template. We’re constantly improving these for you. You’ll enable the macros once it opens. There are macro instructions that tell you exactly how to use the lookahead and weekly work plan. You have a weekly work plan tab and a six-week lookahead tab that are automatic. If you’re referencing the full norm schedule for your production plan in Excel, you can automatically create the weekly work plan and six-week lookahead here. You also have a manual tab if you want to copy it over manually.

Running the Trade Partner Weekly Tactical Meeting

When you’re in the trade partner weekly tactical meeting, you have inside the room the superintendent, assistant supers, field engineers, and especially all of the foremen. Before the meeting even starts, trade partners and foremen come over to the boards on the left wall and put up red magnets for any problems they’re experiencing any roadblocks. These roadblocks become the bulk of your agenda. You’re going to solve roadblocks as the bulk of your agenda.

But you will use your screens at the front to do two specific things dealing with your lookahead and your weekly work plan. When you’re in the software, you can either bring up the lookahead and do this with trade partners, or have them work with printouts which I actually prefer. You’re going to set a timer for probably five to ten minutes and say “I would like each of you trade partners, this is the work you’ve already coordinated in the pull plan. Please take all of your activities and make sure you’re ready all the way to six weeks out and that you have the needed items.”

If something is wrong that’s going to take place in the next six weeks that will not prepare an activity, turn that into a roadblock. One of the cool things I like to do is have the 17-point make-ready checklist up on one of the screens or the board or taped down to each seat at the table. You’re going to say “these 17 things are required for each of your activities, and if each of these 17 things are not on track, then we have a problem and that will be a roadblock we’ll want to identify and fix.”

Coordinating the Weekly Work Plan Without Recreating It

The second thing you’ll do inside the trade partner weekly tactical is make sure the weekly work plan is fully coordinated. As you go through this and have each trade talk to their activities or you talk through them and ask if they’re ready, however you want to run the meeting if there are adjustments, you can simply pop into the software and make adjustments to specific activities.

But the weekly work plan should not be created from whole cloth. You shouldn’t say “trade partner, go give me your weekly work plan.” The weekly work plan is already filtered out of your production plan because this production plan is from the pull plan. We don’t have to do overprocessing. We don’t have to do rework. It’s automatically filtered from the production plan.

Are we going to shove this down their throat simply because they did the pull plan with us? No. As we’re going through this, if there are activities that need to move, we can move them right now in the application or on the Excel template. The key is that we coordinate those handoffs to make sure each trade partner is committing themselves and promising trade-to-trade that specific work will happen. And we do it right here using the filtered plan as our coordination tool.

Reviewing Last Week, Current Week, Planning Next Week

Here’s the sequence that makes this work. We need to know how we’re trending. We look at the week before the current week last week. If we didn’t hit some of these items last week, we need to look at those variances and root causes and make sure we’re taking lessons learned forward. Once we have those root causes, we can start doing things differently.

This weekly work plan timing is important to understand. Last week is the week before. The current week is the week you’re in and executing. The next week is the week you’re planning. Then you review current progress. Now that you’ve reviewed last week and looked at anything you didn’t accomplish the variance, the root causes, and any activities that might need to roll forward you look at the current week. You’re going to see how we’re trending this week, if there are any corrections needed for the rest of the week, do we need to anticipate moving anything into next week, and are there any root causes that will affect decisions for next week.

Then you create the next weekly work plan by coordinating the week in front of you where everything is agreed to by the trades from the pull plan and adjusted accordingly. This is absolutely crucial. We’re looking specifically at handoffs and making sure each trade partner makes commitments based on what’s possible.

The Types of Handoff Coordination Conversations You’ll Have

Make sure trades know they are making promises to other contractors and that you’re making any adjustments needed for them to make those promises while following lean principles. Here are the types of conversations you’re going to have during weekly work plan coordination:

Weekly Work Plan Coordination Scenarios

• Conversation 1 – Ahead of Schedule: Wagon A is one day ahead and asks permission to move to different zones one day early. Does this help or hurt downstream trades? Can handoffs happen cleanly a day early?
• Conversation 2 – Overlap Coordination: Wagon C needs to finish a few things and can work with wagon D without affecting them. Verify the spatial coordination works and no interference will occur.
• Conversation 3 – Catch-Up Plan: Wagon crew E will finish this zone one day late but it will not affect other trades and they can catch up. Confirm buffer absorption doesn’t threaten milestone.
• Conversation 4 – Schedule Adjustment: Wagon B crew will be out Friday but plan to finish Tuesday next week. Adjust the plan and verify successor trades can accommodate the shift.

These are real coordination conversations where you’re using the filtered weekly work plan as the base and making adjustments based on field reality while maintaining handoff integrity and milestone alignment. Write down roadblocks as you go so you can solve them. Once you have all this figured out and your weekly work plan locked in, you can lock it and print PDFs to share in programs like Procore or send out in your day plan to trade partners by email.

Understanding Strategic Horizons and Rolling Horizons

What I really want to make clear is you’re looking at what I call rolling horizons or strategic horizons. This is how different planning windows create the complete coordination system:

Planning Horizon Breakdown (Looking Forward)

• 12 Weeks / 3 Months Out: Anything within the next three months must be pull planned with trades to establish sequence and validate trade flow
• 6 Weeks Out (Green Zone): Anything within the next six weeks must be part of your make-ready lookahead planning to identify and remove roadblocks
• 3 Weeks Out (Yellow Zone): Anything three weeks out must be part of a preconstruction meeting with detailed logistics and final coordination
• 1 Week Out (Blue Zone): Anything one week out must be part of the weekly work plan with commitments and handoff coordination finalized

You can look at this preparatory way (forward from today) or retrospectively (backward from execution). Some people find the concept easier to understand if we look at what should have taken place before today. Either way, you have to look at planning in strategic horizons or rolling horizons.

The Critical Distinction: Lookahead vs Weekly Work Plan

Make sure you’re using your make-ready lookahead plan to make work ready and find and remove roadblocks. Your weekly work plan is your execution nearest to your data date. Six weeks out is where you’re trying to find roadblocks. Between your weekly work plan and when you find roadblocks six weeks out is when you’re trying to solve roadblocks.

In the trade partner weekly tactical, you work to find and remove roadblocks. You’re making work ready inside the lookahead window. By the time you hit the weekly work plan, work should be roadblock-free except for anything that would happen obviously that immediate day. And your weekly work plan is for making commitments and coordinating handoffs not for finding problems. The problems should have been found and solved already during lookahead planning.

Resources for Implementation

If you want the agendas and details, this is in the book Takt Steering & Control which shows you exactly how to run these meetings. If you don’t have InTakt software, we have free Excel templates at elevateconstruction.com under resources. We’re constantly improving these templates to give you the tools you need for effective lookahead and weekly work planning.

I highly recommend that from your production plan, you practice exporting out the lookahead and the weekly work plan. Practice finding and removing roadblocks. Determine for yourself where and when you’ll host these meetings to interface with your foremen. If your project needs help implementing lookahead and weekly work planning that filters from production plans instead of recreating coordination from scratch, if your trade partner weekly tactical meetings burn time without removing roadblocks, if your plans drift from your production plan every week, Elevate Construction can help your field teams stabilize, schedule, and flow through systematic filtered planning that respects coordination work already completed.

Building Coordination Systems That Don’t Waste Time

This connects to everything we teach at Elevate Construction about respecting both people and process. Lookahead planning and weekly work planning aren’t bureaucratic overhead they’re essential coordination mechanisms that only work when they filter from validated production plans instead of recreating coordination from memory every week.

Everything in the planning hierarchy exists for the purpose of getting to the lookahead and weekly work plan so that you can plan every day to execute work in the field. The master schedule sets milestones. Pull planning creates coordinated sequences and validates trade flow. Production plans optimize zones and gain buffers. Lookaheads identify and remove roadblocks six weeks out. Weekly work plans coordinate commitments and handoffs one week out. Day plans communicate change points to workers. Every level filter from the level above it, preserving coordination while enabling appropriate tactical adjustment.

A Challenge for Project Teams

Here’s the challenge. Stop creating lookahead plans and weekly work plans from scratch every week. Start filtering them from your production plan that already has the sequence, trade flow, zone organization, and handoffs validated. Stop burning meeting time recreating coordination work. Start spending that time finding and removing the roadblocks your filtered plans reveal.

Set up your trade partner weekly tactical meeting with proper conference room layout. Have trade partners mark roadblocks on boards before the meeting. Filter your six-week lookahead from the production plan. Give trades five to ten minutes with the 17-point make-ready checklist to verify their activities are ready. Turn anything not on track into roadblocks to solve. Filter your weekly work plan from the production plan. Coordinate handoffs and adjustments. Review last week’s variances, current week’s trends, and next week’s commitments. Solve roadblocks collaboratively. Lock and share the coordinated plans.

Use InTakt software for automatic filtering or Excel templates for manual approaches. Either way, maintain the filter discipline. The production plan is your source of truth. Lookaheads and weekly work plans are filtered views that maintain alignment while enabling tactical coordination. As Taiichi Ohno said: “The key to the Toyota Way and what makes Toyota stand out is not any of the individual elements…but what is important is having all the elements together as a system.” Filtering lookaheads and weekly work plans from production plans is how you maintain system integrity while enabling tactical flexibility.

On we go.

Frequently Asked Questions

What’s the difference between lookahead and weekly work plan?

Lookaheads (6 weeks out) find and remove roadblocks to make work ready. Weekly work plans (1 week out) coordinate commitments and handoffs after roadblocks are removed.

Why can’t I create lookaheads and weekly work plans from scratch?

Because you lose alignment to production plan, waste time recreating coordination already completed during pull planning, and drift from validated trade flow and sequences.

How long should trade partner weekly tactical meetings take?

Plan 60-90 minutes: 5-10 minutes for lookahead verification with make-ready checklist, 10-15 minutes for weekly work plan coordination, remainder for solving roadblocks identified.

What if my production plan needs adjustment during weekly planning?

Make adjustments in the software or template right in the meeting. The filter approach doesn’t mean rigid it means starting with validated coordination and adjusting based on field reality.

Can I use Excel templates instead of InTakt software?

Yes. Free templates at elevateconstruction.com automatically generate lookaheads and weekly work plans from your production plan with macros. Manual tab available for copy-over approach.