Elevating Project Excellence Through Lean Construction Maturity

COMMENTARY

By LIM YIILIANG

Sarawak, Malaysia

Within today’s highly competitive and complex construction sector, project organisations face mounting pressure to provide enhanced value with accelerated delivery schedules to achieve sustainable results, while keeping the costs within allocated budget. Traditional delivery methods, however, often fall short due to fragmented teams, rework, waste, and reactive decision-making. To overcome these systemic challenges, forward-looking organisations are turning to Lean Construction (LC), a philosophy and practice rooted in continuous improvement, value generation, and waste elimination.

The journey to realising the full benefits of LC requires structured progression, which is captured through the Lean Construction Maturity (LCM) model. The model offers a structured pathway to assess project organisation’s current stage of Lean adoption, pinpoint improvement opportunities, and align operational strengths with the goal of organisational excellence. As organisations advance through successive Lean maturity stages, which is from sporadic use to fully embedded Lean practices, it is anticipated they develop not only technical proficiency but also cultural adaptability, stronger leadership, and improved stakeholder collaboration, all of which underpin successful project outcomes. The transition from maturity to excellence highlights LC’s pivotal role in reshaping project organisational excellence. This context reflects an organisation’s ability to reliably deliver high-performing projects while nurturing innovation, teamwork, and ongoing learning.

From Maturity to Excellence: The Role of LC in Transforming Project Organisations

Project organisational excellence refers to the capacity of a construction organisation to consistently deliver high-performance projects while fostering innovation, collaboration, and continuous learning. It is not achieved through isolated tools or temporary fixes, but through embedded systems, aligned values, and adaptive processes. In this context, LC becomes more than a productivity tool, it becomes a strategic capability.

The LCM model is structured into five ascending levels namely Initial, Emerging, Defined, Integrated, and Optimised. Each level represents a deeper integration of Lean principles into the organisation’s culture, strategy, and operations. As organisations mature, they move from inconsistent and reactive practices to a high-performance culture built on flow efficiency, stakeholder alignment, and continuous improvement. This progression forms the basis of organisational excellence, characterised by strong leadership, holistic systems thinking, a focus on value generation, and the capacity to adapt.

Table 1: LC Maturity Levels
(Source: Author’s own work)

 Level 0: Initial – Ad-hoc Lean Application

At the Initial stage, Lean methods are usually applied in a fragmented manner, typically as a short-term response to pressing issues and without any clear strategic alignment or strong organisational backing. Problem-solving remains largely in reactive mode, with techniques such as 5S or root-cause analysis employed in isolation. Although these efforts are undertaken with good intentions, they often produce uneven results and fail to establish process stability required for sustained improvement.

With respect to organisational excellence, this stage highlights a disconnect between the aspirations of leadership and the effectiveness of day-to-day operations. Project teams often observed operating in silos, knowledge is generally not systematically captured, and there is minimal cross-project learning. Excellence at this stage is hindered by inconsistency, limited accountability, and lack of shared goals.

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How to cite this work: YiiLiang, L. (2025). Elevating Project Excellence Through Lean Construction Maturity, Commentary, PM World Journal, Vol. XIV, Issue IX, September.  Available online at https://pmworldlibrary.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/pmwj156-Sep2025-YiiLiang-Elevating-Project-Excellence-Through-Lean-Construction-Maturity.pdf

About the Author

LIM YIILIANG

Sarawak, Malaysia

Mr. LIM YIILIANG hails from the oil-rich state of Sarawak, Malaysia, and brings over 27 years of experience across the Oil & Gas and Construction sector. A certified Project Management Professional (PMP) by Project Management Institute (PMI) USA, he has worked in multiple countries, including Brunei, Germany, Malaysia, Oman, Singapore, UAE and the UK, with leading multinational energy companies such as Shell, Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), Brunei LNG, ORPIC, OQ, and currently, Petroleum Sarawak (PETROS) as Project Delivery Manager.

Area of expertise cover the aspects of Project Management, Construction Management, Project Governance & Assurance, Contract Management, Scope Change Management, Project Control & Services, Cost Control, Value Assurance Review (VAR), Project Engineering, HSSE Performance Management and Risk Management.

He is a humble PhD student on part-time basis majoring in Construction Management, with research focus on Lean Construction. YIILIANG can be contacted at nicewilliam@rocketmail.com