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This paper aims to highlight the need to place focus on ensuring soft factors in construction projects’ design management and to discuss whether soft factors are hidden success factors.

The presented data is a result of findings from two master theses. The approach is qualitative research and consists of nine semi-structured interviews with design managers and two case studies involving document analyses, meeting observations and descriptions of seven interviews.

This empirical study demonstrates that soft factors are considered important for design managers’ achievement of a successful design process. Focus on soft factors promotes good communication and will improve team performances. Factors are hidden because they are invisible and immeasurable. Furthermore, soft factors are not defined as assigned tasks and are, therefore, easily neglected. Designers are hesitant to explore the possibilities of new technology owing to the fear that they will forfeit human interaction.

This paper is limited to the presentation of empirical findings. Therefore, theory is not a basis for the study but rather a framework for the discussion.

The results in this paper broaden the understanding of human behaviour during the design phase. This knowledge should be considered when the project’s delivery model is designed as it will safeguard actor concerns during the ongoing technological transformation.

This paper contributes knowledge of the view regarding soft factors among project actors. It expands the traditional understanding of value by adding soft factors to the traditional success measures of time, quality and cost.

This research subscribes to the on-going process school of construction project briefing. Stakeholders underrepresented in the literature are engaged with by focussing on Formula 1 motor racing circuits. Attention is given to the rationales through which stakeholders define construction projects at such venues. The aim of this paper is to understand the realities experienced by stakeholders and how these resonate with the rhetoric of briefing literatures.

A single case-based research approach, encouraged for studying informality and emergence, was used to study a heritage oriented construction project at Silverstone Formula 1 Circuit, UK. Data included field-notes, interviews and strategy documents. Stakeholder interests cannot be directly accessed; however, language used when defining projects can be. Analysis focussed on how project rationales drawn directly from data could be grouped into interpretative repertoires. These repertoires are linguistic resources, drawn upon by stakeholders, formed partly from sets of rationales oriented around a common interest.

The priorities given to competing rationales are found to fluctuate through time and depending on audience. Project advocates mobilise these conflicting rationales, from different repertoires, to different audiences simultaneously when strategically defining the heritage project. Discursive definitions emerged during analysis through studying both formal and informal briefing practices.

Conflict among stakeholders with competing agendas during briefing is widely recognised however references to discursivity are currently scant.

Coping with discursivity during briefing poses significant challenges for construction professionals.

By interpreting strategic briefing as an on-going and discursive process of project definition, researchers and practitioners can better empathise with realities experienced by stakeholders.