Cheng Wu

Explore The Compatibility between Lean Information Flow and Emergency Projects

School research theme: Management of projects
Research supervisors: Prof. Grant Mills and Dr Simon Addyman
Start date: February 2023

The occurrence frequency of emergency events has been unprecedentedly increased in the twenty-first century. The demand to mitigate and respond to these emergencies has attracted considerable attention to mitigation strategies and projects that aimed to counter the emergency. Due to the emergency project delivery outcome possessing the effect of mitigating or responding to the urgent threat, the project delivery time will directly relate to the alleviation pace of emergency damage in this context. Furthermore, due to the features of emergency, the information flow in emergency situations needs to be more swift, succinct, accurate, and accessible to support the project’s delivery. However, how to manage the information flow to achieve the need of emergency projects remains largely unexplored. Applying lean thinking specifically to information flows is a relatively new area of the research endeavour. Lean information flow aims to eliminate and avoid communication waste to ensure the flow is efficient. However, lean information flow has not been widely applied to projects in practice. Based on the demand of emergency projects’ communication and the effect of lean information flow, it can speculate that the concept of lean information flow might have been unconsciously applied to emergency project management’s information management to improve communication efficiency. This research, which focuses on the compatibility between lean information flow and emergency projects, might help project managers identify the concept of how to manage information flow in urgent situations and provide researchers with a comprehensive understanding of how to apply lean information flow in practice.