The Empire State Building in New York City, with its 103 stories, 73 elevators, 2,500,000 feet of electrical cable and 6,500 windows, was built in 405 days. The framework rose at a rate of four-and-a-half stories per week. That’s nearly a floor a day. Most impressive was that the project came in under budget and ahead of schedule. Today, it seems smaller-scale projects take longer than 410 days to complete, even having the technology available to do things faster than was possible 75 years ago. How did the project managers for the Empire State Building do it? Obviously, they had to have been the best project managers of the day. They applied the tenets of sound project management and used something beyond that. They used quality management concepts found in lean and Six Sigma.Lean has its origins in the teaching and writings of total quality management and just-in-time techniques, which espouse the idea of “delighting the customer through a continuous stream of value-adding activities.” The value stream defines the lean enterprise.

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