Pull Planning in Construction
Pull planning is the planning technique at the heart of the Last Planner System: the people doing the work plan it backwards from a target milestone, pulling activities from each other in the order they are actually needed. It is where a project stops being a Gantt chart that nobody owns and becomes a sequence the trades have agreed to deliver.
What is pull planning?
Pull planning is a collaborative, reverse-pass scheduling technique in which each trade pulls work from the trade immediately upstream of them, working backwards from a target milestone until the sequence reaches the current week. The output is a plan authored by the last planners rather than imposed on them, with every handoff between trades made explicit.
Also known as: reverse-pass planning, phase pull planning, collaborative planning, pull scheduling. In the Last Planner System literature, “pull planning” most commonly refers to the phase-level planning session.
How a pull planning session actually runs
A phase-level pull session plans a four-to-eight-week sequence in a single sitting. The facilitator is usually the main-contractor planner. The participants are the last planners — the foremen and subcontractor leads who will commit crews to the work. The method itself is simple; what the method surfaces is where its value lives.
- 1
Post the target milestone
The facilitator writes the phase-end milestone on the right-hand side of the board — concrete pour complete on 15 November, services energised on 22 November, phase handover on 30 November. This is the fixed point every subsequent note is pulled from.
- 2
Ask the last trade in the sequence what they need to start
The last planner for the final trade in the phase posts a sticky note immediately before the milestone: “to hand over by 30 November, finishings must be snagged by 25 November”. They state what has to be true for their work to be ready.
- 3
Pull each upstream trade in turn
The trade immediately upstream of finishings is asked the same question. Each sticky note includes the activity, the trade, the duration, and critically the handoff condition — what the preceding trade must have left behind.
- 4
Make the handoffs explicit
At every interface the facilitator asks both trades to agree the handoff condition in their own words. “Walls plumb, services tested, surfaces free of debris, access cleared.” A disagreement here is the single most valuable thing to surface — it is a constraint that would have broken the plan silently.
- 5
Walk the sequence forward and stress-test it
Once the pull reaches the current week, the whole sequence is walked forward and tested. Does the pour-cure-strip-form rhythm actually work with one crew? Does the inspector availability sync with completion? Durations get adjusted, parallel work gets identified, risky handoffs get flagged for the lookahead.
- 6
Transfer to the lookahead and the master
The agreed sequence is captured — on paper for a photo, into a planning tool, or into the CPM master — and becomes the authoritative plan for the phase. The lookahead process then screens each handoff for constraints before the committing week.
Worked example: pulling back from a handover milestone
Take a six-week finishing phase on a mid-rise residential project. The target milestone is handover on 30 November. A pull session with the main-contractor planner and the seven participating trades produces the sequence below — read right-to-left, as the session actually ran.
| Week | Trade | Activity | Handoff condition |
|---|---|---|---|
| Week 6 | Client / PM | Handover walk + sign-off | All snags closed, O&M docs delivered |
| Week 6 | Fit-out | Final snag + clean | Services commissioned, defects list cleared |
| Week 5 | MEP | Commissioning + witness tests | All fixtures live, panels labelled |
| Week 4 | Painter | Second coat + touch-up | Walls dust-free, lighting installed |
| Week 3 | Flooring | Finish floor + protection | Walls complete, MEP first-fix verified |
| Week 2 | MEP | Second-fix + fixtures | Partitions boarded, ceilings open |
| Week 1 | Partitions | Board + skim | Services roughed-in, structure clear |
What the session actually surfaced
Three issues the master CPM did not see: the MEP second-fix required ceilings to still be open when the painter was scheduled to start, the flooring handoff needed walls fully complete when they were still at skim stage, and commissioning witness slots had not been booked. All three were resolved in the session — ceilings resequenced, flooring pushed by two days, commissioning slots booked that afternoon. None would have been caught by a Gantt review, because none was a date issue; all three were handoff-condition issues.
Where pull planning breaks down in practice
The method itself is robust. The failure modes are organisational — pull planning returns thin value when the room is not set up to produce real commitments, or when the output of the session never makes it back into the plan everyone else is working from.
Senior management runs the session
If the project director or client runs the room, last planners default to status-reporting language and the commitments drift upward. The facilitator should be a planner; the committers should be the people doing the work.
The sticky notes stay on the wall
A photo of the completed board goes on a WhatsApp group and the master CPM is updated by hand two weeks later, if at all. The lookahead the field uses then starts to drift from the master the office is reporting on.
Handoff conditions get skipped
The session fills in trades and durations but skips the handoff conditions column. Six weeks later the exact same arguments the session was meant to prevent are happening on site, trade-by-trade.
Pull planning run once, never repeated
A kickoff pull session that is never refreshed is a static artefact, not a live plan. The expectation of a lean programme is that each phase has its own pull session and the lookahead screens for constraints weekly against the pulled sequence.
How VisiLean carries a pull plan into delivery
A pull session only pays back when the sequence it produces becomes the sequence the team actually works to. VisiLean Planner captures the agreed sequence against the CPM master so the pulled handoffs survive the week after the session.
- The sticky-note sequence can be captured as activities with handoff conditions against the CPM master, so the pulled plan does not live in a side spreadsheet or a photo of the board.
- Handoff conditions carry through as constraints that the lookahead process maps and tracks against the live schedule.
- Last planners update completion from the LiveSite mobile app, so the pulled sequence shows planned-vs-actual on the same schedule the office is working from.
- Each phase can be pulled again as its date approaches, with the lessons from the previous phase visible to the planners in the room.
Related methods
Last Planner System
The production-control system pull planning sits inside. The five conversations, PPC calculation, and where LPS breaks when the pull step is skipped.
Read moreLookahead Planning
The six-week screening step that takes a pulled sequence and tests each handoff for constraints before the committing week.
Read moreCritical Path Method
The master schedule the pull plan feeds back into. CPM supplies the frame; pull planning supplies the sequence the trades have signed up to.
Read moreVisiLean Planner
The product that carries the pull session output into the master, the lookahead and the weekly commitment set as views of the same schedule.
Read moreFrequently asked questions
What is pull planning in simple terms?
Pull planning is a collaborative scheduling technique where the people who will do the work plan it backwards from a target milestone. Instead of a planner pushing dates to the trades, each trade pulls work from the trade before them by asking what has to be true for their own work to start. The result is a sequence agreed by the people responsible for delivering it, with trade handoffs the whole team has signed up to.
What is the difference between push planning and pull planning?
Push planning is scheduled from the start date forward using logic and expected durations — the master CPM is the classic example. Pull planning is scheduled from the finish date backward, with each trade pulling work from the trade upstream of them. Push produces an optimised plan on paper; pull produces a plan the field has committed to. Mature lean programmes use both: push for the master, pull for the phase and the lookahead.
Who should attend a pull planning session?
The last planners — the foremen, superintendents and subcontractor leads who actually commit crews to work — plus the main-contractor planner facilitating. The design team joins for the first session of a phase to answer sequencing questions. Senior management is better out of the room: the point of pull planning is that commitments come from the people doing the work, not from the people reviewing them.
How long does a pull planning session take?
A phase-level pull plan for a four-to-eight-week sequence typically runs three to four hours. A full-programme pull plan at project kickoff can take a full day or spread across two half-days. Weekly pull sessions during delivery are 30 to 60 minutes. The time investment feels large until the first missed-commitment week it prevents.
What is a reverse pass in pull planning?
Reverse pass is the actual act of planning backwards from a target. The facilitator posts the end milestone, then asks the last trade in the sequence what must be complete immediately before they can start. That answer becomes the next sticky note upstream. The process continues until the sequence reaches the current week. Each handoff is explicit, visible and agreed, which is exactly what a Gantt view hides.
See a pull session carried into a live schedule
VisiLean captures the pull-session sequence against the CPM master so the handoffs the trades agreed in the room become the handoffs the lookahead screens every week.