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The paper aims to identify the effective constructability methods and tools that should be applied during the early project design stages to prevent specific constructability failures regarding project context.

Seventeen basic constructability problems were defined, 12 constructability implementation methods for investigation were selected, and a general tool representing potential causal connections between the problems and the methods that could prevent them was developed. A comparative case study was conducted through a rigorous investigation of the construction documentation of four major building construction projects. Nearly four hundred constructability problems were identified. The tool developed was used to draw conclusions about the preferred constructability methods, in general, and with respect to specific project contexts.

The managerial approach offers the best methods for preventing constructability problems. The major methods that emerged were (1) assigning a constructability champion, (2) facilitating the involvement of the general contractor early in the design process, and (3) augmenting design quality control. At the other end of the scale, methods such as company procedures and owner involvement were found to be the least effective.

The paper offers the ability to relate constructability problems to preventive mechanisms and to identify the appropriate steps to be taken to resolve these problems. The mechanism described here can be used by construction companies that keep failure data within accounting files to check projects in retrospect and draw lessons from them to be implemented in future projects.

This study aims to show how laser scanning data can be utilised to quantitatively assess “blind lifts” with respect to their rate and spatial distribution.

This study employed time study of crane cycles for quantitative measuring of the crane’s work periods in dead areas and mapping the crane operator’s field of view and developing a model that allows the spatial analysis of blind lifts.

This study found a discrete geometric laser scan-based model that is capable of locating and quantifying the visible and invisible zones from the crane operator’s cabin; 28 per cent of the analyzed crane’s work area represented by the model were found to be invisible, which corresponds fairly to 35 per cent of the half-cycles measured manually that were found to involve blind lifting; the range of blind lifts duration derived from the spatial information-based model was 50 to 84 per cent, which is in excellent correspondence with the 54 per cent to 82 per cent range obtained from the time unit-based analysis.

The laser-based model and the ensuing analyses are limited to the type of buildings whose envelope can practically be represented by the vertical extrusion of their footprint.

The practical implications of the study are reduction of blind lifts as a factor when selecting the location of the crane and staging areas; more effective preplanning of signallers positioning; and ad hoc consideration of analysed dead space for various lift task-based decision-making during construction.

This study demonstrates the ability to capture the geometric relations that characterise the work scene around the tower crane by harnessing the increasingly available laser technology and correlates the results of the manual observations with those obtained from the laser-based model.

The need to provide immediate housing solutions for hundreds of thousands of people in the early 1990's faced the Israeli construction industry with an unprecedented challenge: to multiply overnight its output and drastically cut construction time. It also created a unique opportunity to observe a national‐level experiment of great magnitude aimed at meeting that challenge. The present paper reports on a study that examined how construction companies managed to cut housing construction time to half of what had been accepted earlier as a normal pace. This was achieved by implementing an approach that concurrently and integratively treats environment, technology and management determinants, creating a synergetic effect. The present paper introduces and demonstrates the integrative approach to schedule compression, and highlights the role of the environment.