Parade of Trades

The Parade Game illustrates the impact work flow variability has on the performance of construction trades and their successors.

The game consists of simulating a construction process in which resources produced by one trade are prerequisite to work performed by the next trade. Production-level detail, describing resources being passed from one trade to the next, illustrates that throughput will be reduced, project completion delayed, and waste increased by variations in flow. The game shows that it is possible to reduce waste and shorten project duration by reducing the variability in work flow between trades. Basic production management concepts are thus applied to construction management. They highlight two shortcomings of using CPM for field-level planning: CPM makes modeling the dependence of ongoing activities between trades or with operations unwieldy and it does not explicitly represent variability. The Parade Game can be played in a classroom setting either by hand or using a computer