Every plan failure I've ever chased down came back to the same root cause: work hit the weekly plan before it was actually ready to run. Somebody wrote drywall on the board for Tuesday, the crew showed up, and the electrician hadn't been through yet. Or the material was on a truck somewhere in Ontario. Or the inspection nobody scheduled meant the ceiling couldn't close. The crew stood around, the foreman burned the morning finding filler work, and the schedule quietly slipped another half day.
Make-ready is the fix. It's the part of the Last Planner System where you stop planning and start clearing the road, so that when a task lands on the weekly work plan, the crew can walk up and do it without hitting a wall. Get make-ready right and your Percent Plan Complete climbs on its own. Skip it, and no amount of good intentions on Monday morning will save you.
What make-ready actually is
Make-ready is the systematic work of removing constraints from an activity before it needs to start. It lives in the look-ahead window — usually the six weeks between your phase plan and the day a crew picks up tools. During that window, every activity coming down the pipe gets screened, its constraints get identified, each constraint gets an owner and a date, and you chase them until they're gone.
The whole thing hinges on one honest question, asked out loud for every task: what has to be true before this crew can walk up and work? Answer it completely, assign the answers, and resolve them early. That's the entire game. The reason it fails so often isn't that it's hard — it's that it's tedious, and tedious work gets skipped when the day gets busy.
The eight constraint categories — and where they actually bite
A good constraint screen is boring and thorough. Walk every activity against the same list so nothing slips through. I use eight buckets, and I'll tell you where each one has burned me:
- Materials. Ordered, confirmed, and staged — not "the PO went out." A submittal that hasn't been approved is not a material you have. Long-lead items (switchgear, elevators, custom glazing, structural steel) are the ones that quietly eat schedules because nobody screened them eight weeks out.
- Information. Drawings, an approved shop drawing, an RFI answer, a color selection. This is the sneakiest category because the gap is invisible until a foreman opens the plans and finds a cloud with no resolution.
- Predecessors. The prior trade has to be complete and inspected, not "basically done." Ninety-percent-done rough-in is zero-percent-ready for the trade that follows.
- Labor. Right headcount, right skill, actually assigned. A sub who's "sending guys" without a name and a count is a constraint, not a plan.
- Equipment. Lift, hoist time, pump, welding machine, and the operator to run it. Shared equipment on a tight site is a scheduling constraint all by itself.
- Space. The area has to be clear and safe to occupy — no other trade stacked on top of you, no material lay-down blocking the work face. This is where you lose productivity to trade stacking that looked fine on paper.
- Permits and inspections. The rough inspection that has to pass before you close the wall. The permit that has to be in hand. These have lead times you don't control, so they have to be screened early.
- Safety and conditions. Overhead protection, a confined-space permit, temp power, a dry slab. Work that can't be done safely isn't ready no matter what else is cleared.
If you only ever screen for materials and predecessors — which is where most teams stop — you'll get blindsided by information and inspection constraints every single week. Those two are the quiet killers.
The workflow, start to finish
The mechanics are simple enough to run in a spreadsheet, though a real look-ahead tool keeps the whole team honest and current. Here's the loop:
1. Pull the activity into the window
Each week, new work rolls into the far edge of your six-week look-ahead from the phase plan. That's your screening queue. Everything that just entered gets looked at now, while there's still time to fix what's wrong.
2. Screen for constraints
Run every new activity against the eight categories. Capture every constraint, even the ones you're pretty sure will resolve themselves. "Pretty sure" is how the electrical inspection you assumed was scheduled becomes the reason forty guys stand down. Write it down. It costs you thirty seconds now and a day later.
3. Assign an owner and a need-by date
A constraint with no name attached will not get resolved — it'll sit there looking resolved because nobody's job it is to move it. Every constraint gets one accountable person and a date it must clear by, working backward from when the work starts. Not the PM as a catch-all. A specific human.
4. Track status and chase it
Open, in progress, resolved — that's all the granularity you need. What matters is that somebody looks at the open ones every week and pushes. A constraint log you write once and never revisit is just a to-do list decorating a binder.
5. Verify before it hits the weekly plan
This is the gate, and it's the one people cheat. Before an activity is allowed onto the weekly work plan, confirm every constraint is resolved — past tense, done, verified — not "should be fine by then." If you commit crews to work whose constraints are still open, you've just converted a make-ready problem into a plan failure, and now it shows up in your PPC.
What "ready" has to mean
The single most important cultural fight you'll have is over the word ready. It has to mean one thing, with no soft edges:
- Every constraint resolved and verified — not almost, not probably.
- Scope defined tightly enough that a foreman can commit to it and measure it done.
- Labor, equipment, and material confirmed available for the actual dates.
- Clean handoffs understood — what you're receiving from the trade before you, what you're leaving for the trade after.
The moment you let "almost ready" onto the weekly plan, you've taught everyone that ready is negotiable. It isn't. The whole system's reliability rests on that one word holding its meaning.
Match your screening horizon to real lead times
The reason the look-ahead is six weeks and not two is that constraints have lead times, and you have to catch them before the clock runs out. Rough numbers I plan around:
- Long-lead materials: six weeks and up — screen these the day the activity enters the window, not later.
- RFI and design clarifications: plan for two to four weeks for an answer, longer if it needs a redesign or a change order.
- Specialty equipment and cranes: two to three weeks to arrange and confirm.
- Permits and jurisdictional inspections: hugely variable — a same-week rough inspection versus a multi-week permit review — so treat the unknown ones as long-lead until proven otherwise.
- Predecessor completion: visible in your near-term look-ahead, so it's mostly a sequencing and buffer question.
On buffers: give yourself a day or two between trades that need clean-up and inspection in between. Frame-to-rough-in wants that gap for trash-out and the framing inspection. Rough-in-to-cover wants it for the trade inspections before anything closes. Squeezing those buffers to zero is exactly how a slipped inspection cascades into three trades stacked in the same room.
The workable backlog — your insurance policy
Make-ready produces more than next week's plan. It produces a pool of fully-ready work you're not committed to yet — the workable backlog. That backlog is what keeps a crew productive when the primary task falls through anyway. Weather turns, a truck's late, the inspector doesn't show — and instead of sending guys home, the foreman pulls ready work off the shelf.
A crew that always has a ready fallback is a crew that stays busy through the normal chaos of a jobsite. If your backlog is thin, that's a signal your make-ready isn't running far enough ahead. Build the buffer on purpose.
The failure modes to watch for
Make-ready doesn't usually collapse dramatically. It erodes. Watch for these:
- Shallow screening. Only catching the obvious material and predecessor constraints while information and inspection gaps slide through untouched.
- Orphan constraints. Items with no owner, or owned by "the team," which means nobody.
- Optimism as a plan. Logging a constraint and then assuming it'll resolve without anyone actually chasing it.
- Last-minute discovery. Finding the open constraint on Monday morning when the crew's already gloving up. By then it's not a make-ready item — it's a stand-down.
- Ready creep. Slowly accepting less and less as "ready" because everyone's tired of holding the line. This is the one that kills programs, and it happens so gradually you don't notice until your PPC is in the fifties.
Measure it, or it drifts
You don't need a dashboard full of metrics, but a few numbers tell you whether make-ready is actually working. Track how far ahead constraints are being identified — are you catching them with enough runway to resolve them, or always at the last minute? Track how long constraints take to clear, and what share get resolved before they're needed versus after. And watch your workable backlog volume — a shrinking backlog is an early warning that the process is falling behind the schedule.
The number that ties it all together is PPC. When make-ready is genuinely strong, plan completion follows, because you're only committing crews to work that can actually be done. If your PPC is stuck and you're hunting for the cause, look at make-ready first — the tasks that failed almost always trace back to a constraint that was open when the work started.
Where the software earns its keep
You can run make-ready on paper, and plenty of good superintendents have. But the wheels come off at scale — when you've got a hundred constraints across eight subs and a look-ahead that changes every day, a static list falls out of date the moment it's printed. This is where a purpose-built look-ahead tool like LookAheadWall pulls its weight: constraints tied directly to the activities on your visual weekly plan, owners and status visible to the sub who owns them, and field crews updating status from the mobile app instead of routing everything through the superintendent's inbox. The value isn't the software feeling organized — it's that the whole team sees the same current picture, so the constraint that would've surfaced Monday morning surfaces two weeks early instead, while there's still time to fix it.
The tool matters less than the discipline, though. Screen every activity. Name an owner for every constraint. Chase them early. Hold the line on what "ready" means. Do that consistently and your weekly plans stop being wishful and start being reliable — which, in the end, is the only thing make-ready is for.