Al‐Kharashi and Skitmore report on their survey into the causes of delays and time‐overruns of construction projects in the Saudi Arabian public sector and the extent to which stakeholders think these may be mitigated by appropriate action in the future. The authors reveal that the most influential cause of delay is the lack of qualified and experienced personnel. However, they also show differences in the responses from the main stakeholder groups (client/owners, consultants and contractors). In this case it seems that owners and consultants attribute the major causes of delay to be those for which the contractor is responsible and vice versa. This, the authors term the Al‐Khalil and Al‐Ghafly effect, after a similar result in the same topic in 1999 (although the phenomenon was observed in construction surveys as long ago as the Tavistock Institute reports of the 1960s) and suggests that this and other such respondent biases occurring in construction survey work need to be investigated more widely and rigorously to guide future research.
Communication and coordination are important in the management of construction projects, a highly dynamic and complex process. Hossain proposes that use of social network analysis (SNA), together with computational methods such as graph theoretic analysis, text mining and visualization, are crucial in understanding the relationships among different actors. This research helps to explain the participants' sets of activities and interdependencies in terms of the extent to which they help in achieving better coordination for common goals. Social network matrices are constructed using different centrality measures for exploring the association between network centrality and coordination for a construction project. Multi‐layered test designs are developed to explore this relationship in a project‐based coordination of Dabhol Power Company Construction company and Azurix Corporation. Hossain suggests that centrally positioned actors show more coordinative activity, where betweenness index of centrality is the most potent predicate for coordination and the influence of a participant is found to be associated with coordination more than his or her prominence.
The assessment of design quality is rarely related to the ease of construction. Nevertheless, buildability is a notion related to time, cost and quality of construction. Thus, Lam and Wong investigate the potential benefits that can be brought about by benchmarking buildability of designs. Through the use of buildability assessment tools, benchmarks can be established as an incentive for clients and their design teams to improve the buildability of functional buildings in particular. The results of their survey show that time saving is made possible in external wall elements and easy‐to‐assemble details, among other performance‐buildability relationships. Their interviews with practitioners also provide insights on how benchmarking should be implemented in the industry.
Bageis and Fortune investigate whether the bid/no bid decision is influenced by a company's strategy and current situation. Strategy is the determination of the long‐term goals and objectives of an enterprise, and the adoption of courses of action and the allocation of resources necessary for carrying out these goals. This gives an indication of the importance of strategy and purpose of the company to be translated into policies and standards by which the company operates and acts. Linking the company strategy with the bid/no bid decision facilitates the bidding decision‐making process and leads the company to an appropriate decision. Different strategy and situation of contractors' companies leads to different assessment values on the factors affecting the bid/no bid decision. The authors highlight the different weights of factors affecting the bid/no bid decision and the most influential characteristics that cause the variation in the importance of the factors. The findings guide future researchers who are concerned with modelling the bid/no bid decision. Since different contractors' characteristics should be reflected in the way that the bid/no bid decisions are modelled, the conclusion is that instead of developing a general model for all types of contractors, a specified model for pre‐defined model users is recommended.
Caldas and Yun examine critical decision variables that influence preliminary feasibility studies using data mining techniques. They develop a classification model and a prediction model to identify critical decision variables that are typically considered during preliminary feasibility studies (PFS). These models were built using data from 149 infrastructure projects in Korea. The classification model enabled the discovery of hidden rules that determined the most significant implementation decision variables for these projects. The prediction model enabled the prediction of the preliminary feasibility of these projects by using artificial neural network‐based programming. The authors suggest that decision‐makers primarily consider economic and financial factors when they analyse these types of new infrastructure investments. In addition, they found that non‐economic factors were not prevalent in the PFS of the target dataset. Hence, PFS need to reinforce the evaluation criteria for non‐economic factors such as balanced regional development and environmental impact.
Competency‐based measures are increasingly gaining prominence as an important recourse for engendering the professional development of project managers (PMs) in construction management practice. However very little has been done in developing countries, particularly those south of the Sahara, towards promoting this agenda. Ahadzie, Proverbs, Olomolaiye and Ankrah identify the competency profiles that PMs in Ghana can draw on to validate their performance in mass house‐building projects. Property developers can also use the findings to help recruit, monitor and promote the professional development of PMs who share the appropriate competencies. The research design draws on the ‘theory of job performance’ distinguishing task competencies from contextual competencies. The findings corroborated the tenets of the theory, suggesting that researchers could use it as basis for replicating the study across geographical and project‐based sectors of the construction industry.