About this IJMPB issue

Citation

Walker, D.H.T. (2009), "About this IJMPB issue", International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, Vol. 2 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijmpb.2009.35302caa.001

About this IJMPB issue

Article Type: From the Editor From: International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, Volume 2, Issue 3

This issue draws upon papers modified from those originally presented at the “Building Abroad – Procurement of Construction and Reconstruction Projects in the International Context” Conference held at Université de Montréal October 23-25, 2008, available at: www.grif.umontreal.ca/pages/conferencegrif08.htm. The conference was held at the University of Montreal, Montreal, Québec, Canada. It was sponsored by: IF Research Group, grif. Papers were double blind reviewed and subsequently amended and expanded to reflect the project management (PM) perspective and then furthered reviewed. The conference’s focus was on international project procurement in the construction industry but it also, naturally, had a number of papers that were felt to be of interest to the general PM community. Five papers were selected from the conference by the conference organising committee and the authors were invited to submit their papers for an additional level of peer review based on a revised version of their paper that reoriented the papers in a clearly PM setting. The Chair of the Conference Professor Colin Davidson provides a short summary of the conference papers after the main part of this editorial. A practice note (not presented at this conference) is also included in this issue. This note presents leading edge PM practice in a construction industry context within the same thematic PM stream consistent with the International Journal of Managing Projects in Business. This issue also presents two thesis research report notes and two book reviews.

Contributing authors to this issue are based in the UK, France, Cyprus, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Australia, and Canada. This issue brings to our attention six papers on leading edge research, two doctoral thesis research notes and two book reviews as well as information on coming PM events of interest to readers for in 2009 and 2010.

The opening paper entitled “Construction project procurement routes: an in-depth critique” by Adekunle S. Oyegoke, Michael Dickinson, Malik M.A. Khalfan, Peter McDermott, and Steve Rowlinson, examines different categories of building project procurement routes based on organisational, contractual, financial, and technical issues. The paper provides a useful learning opportunity for construction project stakeholders internationally, and clients in particular, to differentiate between procurement routes, management-oriented systems, relational contracting, and incentivisation. Procurement approaches in the construction industry and their evolution should be of interest to readers from other PM industry sectors.

This is followed by the second paper entitled “Managing delivery of sanitation infrastructures for poor communities: decentralizing without penalizing” by Julie Beauséjour. This paper investigates how lessons learnt from a case study of a sanitation project undertaken in periurban Vietnam can indicate a more sustainable scale of operations by decentralisation. As the government of Vietnam has not yet defined its supply programme for sanitation, central governmental supply and operation is questioned by various small non-governmental organization’s (NGO) that could successfully provide community-managed projects. The research identified the skills and expertise necessary for the management of a sustainable sanitation service and suggests that local communities could, with proper training, manage and maintain a simple sanitation system. The sustainability of these community services finally depends on proper coordination by water and sanitation authorities providing specialized technical and project/program managerial support. There is a dearth of literature on project case studies in the NGO world in the PM literature sources and so this paper helps to broaden our understanding of the interface between PM and aid project delivery by providing useful insights on how the project uses a complex system of capacities at various levels.

Paper 3, entitled “The influence of a collaborative procurement approach using integrated design in construction on project team performance” by Daniel Forgues and Lauri Koskela, aims to study the influence of procurement on the performance of integrated design teams. The paper demonstrates that traditional procurement processes reinforce socio-cognitive barriers that hinder team efficiency. It also illustrates how new procurement modes can transform the dynamic of relationships between the client and the members of the supply chain, and have a positive impact on team performance. The paper brings together theories of production in lean construction and social learning as a rival approach to traditional PM theory for demonstrating the importance of context on team performance.

Paper 4, entitled “A project management prospective in achieving a sustainable supply chain for timber procurement in Banda Aceh, Indonesia” by Kelvin Zuo, Regan Potangaroa, Suzanne Wilkinson, and James O.B. Rotimi explores alternative procurement procedures that will address the complexity of issues surrounding timber procurement for housing reconstruction after the Tsunami in Banda Aceh. It reviews construction supply chain management and procurement philosophies with a PM perspective to facilitate the logistics of post-disaster reconstruction. The incorporation of sustainable considerations into the design of procurement routes in the overall PM process for post-disaster construction is something that those involved in PM work in aid projects should recognise. The study shows that basic supply chain management philosophies of ensuring stakeholder integration and collaboration could reduce the problems in timber procurement in Banda Aceh. Sustainable construction and triple bottom line (3BL) criteria are proposed to ensure a value creation process for a wider stakeholder engagement and overall reconstruction project delivery. The paper provides useful PM insights into supply chain management and sustainable construction literature. This case study reviews the timber procurement problems and goes further to present two alternative procurement models that could be implemented as more sustainable responses to post-disaster reconstruction in Banda Aceh. This paper may have wider applications to PM in indicating the importance of 3BL as well as providing another contribution to the literature on aid and disaster response type projects.

Paper 5 presents the last paper from this conference. It is entitled “The use of partnering as a conflict prevention method in large-scale urban projects in Canada” by David Ross. This paper is about how the City of Montreal facilitates the planning and execution of large-scale urban projects within the city limits. These projects are aimed to promote project benefits of a positive image of the city, increase real estate values and thus increase the city’s revenues. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the use of partnering can help to achieve this objective. It also explains partnering from an active stakeholder engagement perspective and uses three case study projects to do this. The paper reports on the paper’s main findings demonstrating that the use of partnering facilitates the planning and execution of urban projects. It has numerous positive impacts as long as a definite set of criteria is respected. It also brings all stakeholders together, enables them to develop better communication, shares their interest in the project, unifies them in the quest for a common solution and gains everyone’s commitment. This paper would have broad appeal to all in the PM community that see stakeholder engagement as an important PM process.

The practice note, entitled “Building information modelling demystified: does it makes business sense to adopt BIM?” by Guillermo Aranda-Mena, John Crawford, Agustin Chevez, and Thomas Froese provides useful and enlightening insights into PM practice on the business benefits of building information modeling (BIM) adoption. BIM offers a revolutionising way to design, document and procure buildings and promises to become a new international benchmark for building design and documentation across the construction industry on the basis of improved efficiencies and collaboration capabilities. However, BIM requires rethinking current practices and process thus it calls for a paradigm shift in the way we procure, design and operate buildings. There seems to be no question that BIM methodologies are to become the norm in the long-term, but more factual evidence is required today to provide guidance to industry. This paper has significance to PM practitioners in that it signals the need for a whole array of business process re-engineering and change management programs of projects.

The first research thesis note is by Dr Douglas C. Bower and Dr Andrew D. Finegan. The paper is entitled “New approaches in project performance evaluation techniques.” This relates to the Doctor of PM degree thesis from RMIT University in Australia that has resulted in several refereed journal papers and numerous conference presentations as well as a working tool which has been used since Dr Bower’s graduation in late 2007. The research reported upon investigates the reasons for the limited adoption of earned value management (EVM) as a project performance evaluation technique. It proposes new extensions to this technique that will be beneficial to PM practitioners. The multifaceted research approach incorporates the following elements:

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  a review of previous and current literature on EVM;

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  a survey of PM practitioners on their practices and attitudes towards EVM;

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  analysis of the known challenges of the EVM technique;

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  development of techniques to address and resolve the EVM challenges;

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  consolidation of those techniques into a single framework and implementation model; and

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  validation of that framework and model through multiple methods.

There is a lot of interest in this topic, particularly in North America and so this paper and its direct URL link will be invaluable to researchers particularly interested in EVM.

The second research thesis note is by Dr Faysal Yatim, Professor Christophe N. Bredillet, and Professor Philippe Ruiz. The paper is entitled “Investigating the deployment of project management: a new perspective based on the concept of certification.” The paper provides a summary description of the doctoral thesis investigating the field of PM deployment undertaken at the Lille School of Management Research in Lille, France. Decision makers and practitioners will be made aware of a set of tools addressing the PM deployment from this work to gain new perspectives. This paper provides a summary of cutting-edge research work in the studied field of PM deployment and a link to the published works that researchers can use to help them understand the thesis research as well as how it can be extended.

Two books are reviewed by Derek H.T. Walker the first, by James Norrie (2008) is entitled Breaking Through the Project Fog: How Smart Organizations Achieve Success by Creating, Selecting and Executing on-Strategy Projects, Wiley, Toronto (245 pages). The second is written by Graham Oaks (2008) entitled Project Reviews, Assurance and Governance, Gower Publishing, Aldershot (269 pages). Both books relate to project governance systems and link with the special issue theme, the Oaks book more directly so – the Norrie book is substantially based on project portfolio management. These are considered current topics of interest to PM readership and so these reviews should prove useful to both academics looking for current content on this interesting area and practitioners who are looking for potential models and to gain experience from authorities in the area.

This next section is written by Colin Davidson and it provides readers with a brief summary of the conference from which the five papers were selected for this special issue. I would also like to thank the conference organising committee: Gonzalo Lizarralde; Colin Davidson, Steve Rowlinson, Alfredo Serpell, and Clément Demers who also participated in the paper reviewing process.

Derek H.T. Walker