The Most Important 15 Minutes of the Day
Everything you need to know to run a daily huddle that aligns and energizes your team.
👋 Hey, Kyle here! Welcome to The Influential Project Manager, a weekly newsletter covering the essentials of successful project leadership.
Today’s Overview:
One of the most common types of waste found in construction projects is waiting time. Without regular communication, workers run into issues that stop their progress and choose to wait for the next weekly meeting to seek solutions.
How can a daily huddle transform project management and improve team performance?
A well-run 15 minute daily huddle can save you 15 hours of confusion. It's where everyone catches up on the project's status, the day's top priorities, any roadblocks, and shares crucial info related to the weekly work plan.
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🤝 The Daily Morning Huddle
Filed under: Lean Tools & Tactics, Project Management
YAY, another meeting!
Said no one, ever.
And yet, here I am, about to tell you to have one every single day. Crazy.
But hear me out. This is one of the most powerful lean tools you have to keep your project team aligned and on track!
Communication and collaboration are keys to any successful project.
A 15 minute daily morning huddle can save you 15 hours of confusion.
It’s the place where a collection of individuals become a team.
A daily huddle first thing in the morning is your opportunity to start the day off right and get everyone working from the same plan.
Do your trade partner foremen seem disengaged?
Do you find yourself fixing issues at the last minute?
Are your trade partners confused about each others priorities?
Do your coordination meetings end with more questions than answers?
If any of this sounds familiar, it’s time for a change. Time for a daily huddle.
What is a Daily Huddle?
A daily huddle is a tool used by successful organizations across many industries—from restaurants to medical offices and construction projects. It's a simple yet effective strategy for transforming a group of individuals into a cohesive team.
The daily huddle is a quick, 15-minute meeting that kicks off the day. It's where everyone catches up on the project's status, the day's top priorities, safety, any roadblocks, and shares crucial info related to the weekly work plan.
At the end of the huddle, everyone knows the overall status, priorities, and their individual contribution for the next 24 hours. If someone is stuck, they can share that and get help. It builds transparency and accountability.
If you are wondering “why huddle?” here are a few reasons:
Productivity: Organizations with daily huddles see a 30% increase in productivity compared to those without.
Organization: With everyone catching up each day, we all know who is working on what, where, and for how long.
Improves Communication: Talking to your team every day naturally makes communication smoother. You'll find expectations are clearer, and everyone's on the same page.
Saves Time: It sounds counter-intuitive, but meeting briefly every day actually saves time. It cuts down on longer, drawn-out meetings and keeps everyone focused on what matters.
Coordination: Team members can use huddles to coordinate handoffs and clarify roles for the day’s tasks. Done correctly, daily huddles ensure that nobody on the project suffers from a miscommunication that could lead to waste.
Planning: As circumstances change, plans change as well. Daily huddles allow members to vocalize those changes to the team to note how their work environment will be impacted by adjustments to the plan.
Teamwork: There's something about meeting every day that brings people together. It builds respect, trust, and camaraderie, which is important for any team striving for success.
The Last Planner System - Big Goals, Small Steps
Pyramids were built by breaking big goals down into small, individual steps.
Building something with a team means you have an established rhythm to plan work. The goal of the daily meeting is to ensure alignment and traction against your plan.
Daily huddles are also one of the pillars of the Last Planner System (LPS), a framework designed to create a predictable workflow and reliable results across project teams. Without daily huddles, your project isn't fully leveraging the LPS methodology.
The Last Planner System (5 Conversations):
Pull-planning establishes what should be done.
Make-ready planning gets the upcoming work in a condition so that it can be done.
Weekly work planning establishes the set of promises from specific people for the work that will be done.
Daily huddles support the last planners in staying on track with their promises so that the work DID get done.
At least weekly, the last planners take time to learn from their performance.
Leading Effective Daily Huddle Meetings
Holding a daily huddle is a skill that improves with practice. By following some best practices, you can quickly start leveraging them to build reliable plans and a strong project culture day by day.
Without further ado, here’s how to make your daily huddles impactful:
1. Logistics
Who Should Attend:
Include everyone who owns a deliverable in the weekly work plan. For larger projects, team leaders should represent their groups. It works best if it's the same person each day, and they take full ownership of their team's work & deliverables.
You should try to keep executives out of the daily meeting. This is a team event, not a reporting meeting. Everyone should feel safe to speak freely.
When to have your meeting:
Hold the huddle every single morning without fail to establish the habit.
To encourage starting on time, pick an odd time. Starting at 6:37 AM or 7:03 AM will be more memorable than 8 AM. People will see it as a gimmick, joke about being 1 minute late, and then it just works. Try it!
Where to have your meeting:
You're building a habit, so be consistent. Same place, every day. Finding a new place every day takes time & energy, and increases friction for attendees.
Choose a location that has the materials you need. This can be a Kanban board, a set of drawings, some visual aids, or a whiteboard for example.
2. Preparation
Preconditions (LPS):
The team should know what they're working on for that week, and how that contributes to the overall project.
The commitments reviewed in the huddle come from the weekly work plan. This plan identifies tasks free of constraints, made ready through the look-ahead process. It assesses near-term work identified during the phase pull planning process to meet target dates set during master planning.
A strong team is aligned and collectively moving towards a goal, within known constraints. If that's not the case, address that elsewhere.
Goals and expectations:
The huddle allows problems to surface early and daily adjustments to be made in response to changing and unexpected conditions. These quick adjustments allow the project to remain on plan without significant re-planning.
Make it clear to everyone attending what the goal of the meeting is. We're here to stay on plan, discuss safety, connect dots, and offer team members a place to raise an issue.
You should go over the ground rules of the daily huddle at least once at the start, and when team members change. If someone's energy is off or they go off topic, have a chat with them - project management is people management.
Roles:
Everyone should know what they're bringing to the meeting. As the project leader, you're the lubricant. Your role is to:
Keep the meeting going, on track & productive
Spot any issues in deliverables, relationships, or interfaces
Make sure everyone speaks, and that everyone feels heard
This is a team having a conversation, not a group of individuals taking turns to say what they did.
3. Running the Meeting
Stick to an agenda. You start the meeting by covering the plan, safety, or metrics on a team level. After that, every individual covers their own victories, priorities, and constraints.
Have the trade leaders get in the habit of routinely answering the following questions at the daily huddle:
What are you working on?
Where are you working?
How many crews/workers are on-site?
What are your constraints/needs?
What material deliveries are coming up?
Are there any safety concerns?
These 6 questions allow everyone to coordinate and collaborate effectively. This achieves buy-in, accountability, and a much more reliable workflow.
Source: The Lean Builder
And finally, don't forget to keep it fun. Bring surprise pastries, celebrate someone's birthday, and don't take yourself too seriously.
Momentum is everything.
Win the morning, win the day!
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Final Thoughts
A consistent daily meeting, where issues are discussed before they've stopped progress, is a crucial piece of project risk management.
It can save hours of confusion and set everyone up to win the day. One extra meeting can eliminate 10 ad-hoc calls during the day.
This is the easiest-to-understand, simplest-to-put- into-affect system I will ever give you. There really is NO excuse for not huddling with your crews.
In summary, to run a great daily huddle:
✔ Do:
Celebrate small wins.
Get your preconditions right.
Start on time and end on time.
Same place, same time, same format.
Make sure participants aren’t interrupting each other.
Ask questions that will encourage your trades to be proactive.
❌ Don’t:
Skip huddles.
Overlook feedback.
Forget that the details matter.
Allow the meeting to become a monologue.
Use daily huddles as a venue to scold team members.
Try to use daily huddles for problem-solving. If problems are brought up, quickly find a different time and place to dive into those topics further.
Just 15 minutes a day could very well be the key to unlocking the extraordinary within your team. It’s time to gather, align, inspire, and celebrate — one huddle at a time.
Until next week,
Kyle Nitchen
LAST WORD 👋
UPCOMING WEBINAR
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Daily huddle is a great tool. Bechtel was doing this in 80’s. A complement is a pre meeting called “Morning Devotions”. This is a short 30 minute problem solving session of teams having problems. Potential invitees construction supervision, field engineers, and materials folks.
Invitations listed by the CM on white board at 4:30 for next morning at 6:00. Having to get up early is great motivation for fixing issues. Only drawback is as Planner I facilitated all sessions.
Really good article (as usual), Kyle!
We used this daily morning meeting technique successfully on my last construction project. It saved us a lot of time, grief, and frustration. More than once, we discovered a minor problem before it grew into a big one.
Also, I really like the "odd" starting time for the meeting. Will definitely try this in the future.
Cheers! -Mark