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"I Love It When A Plan Comes Together"
Hannibal Smith had it half right. A plan is a beautiful thing when it comes together — but on a real jobsite, it only comes together when the people doing the work are the ones who build it.
This episode, Robert sits down with Nialli's Nancy Knowlton and Alan, the team behind Nialli Visual Planner — digital pull planning built to mirror the Last Planner System.
Nancy co-invented the interactive whiteboard before carrying that collaboration pedigree into construction;
Alan came up through the boots-on-the-jobsite research that shaped the product. Their case is simple: the plan isn't a document handed down from an office.
It's a set of promises the trades make to each other.
We get into why so much of the industry still forces work through critical-path schedules nobody in the field ever agreed to, and what changes when you put the foremen at the wall instead.
We talk about the heroics trap — the superintendent pulling it out of the fire at the last minute — and why that runs out of road in a market with no labor to spare.
And we dig into the part most teams ignore: the data a pull plan throws off, and what it's quietly telling you about who's reliable, which region is winning, and where the next delay is coming from.
What we cover:
- How Nialli went from the inventors of the interactive whiteboard to digital pull planning
- The Last Planner framework in plain terms — should, can, will, did
- Why low-bid, transactional contracts work against the plan, and Glenn Ballard's relational-contract counterpoint
- Getting construction off heroics and onto a process that holds
- Reasons-for-variance data, regional analytics, and bidding on capacity instead of price
- New jobsite-photo and organizational-learning features — and where AI actually fits ("chat with your data," not buzzwords)
Check out Nialli at nialli.com. Link in the comments.
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