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The purpose of this study is to investigate how procurement strategies may be designed to facilitate exploration and exploitation in construction projects.

This paper is based on a literature review of organizational research and construction management literature together with a brief interview study of Swedish clients and contractors.

The theoretical and empirical findings propose that small and simple projects with low uncertainty and scarce resources may focus on exploitation to enhance short-term efficiency through traditional procurement strategies including delivery systems that separate the actors and their activities (i.e. pure design-build- or design-bid-build-contracts), fixed price payment and price focus in bid evaluation. Large complex projects with high uncertainty and customization benefit from combining exploration and exploitation to enhance sustainable performance. This requires collaborative procurement strategies including joint specification through early contractor involvement, cost reimbursement coupled with incentive-based payment, bid evaluation based on multiple criteria and collaborative tools and activities in partnering arrangements.

This paper contributes to organizational learning literature by pinpointing the need for integrating procurement strategies that enhance combination of exploration and exploitation. The main contribution to the construction management literature involves the investigation of how procurement strategies may affect exploration and exploitation, as identified and articulated in the propositions developed in this paper.

From a practical perspective, the findings highlight the importance of tailoring procurement strategies to project characteristics to enhance a suitable balance between exploration and exploitation in construction projects.

The explicit focus on the operational project-level is uncommon but relevant in organizational learning literature.

The purpose of this paper is to elaborate the understanding of socialization in the context of temporary operations and organizational settings, using project alliance – the most contemporary approach to the management of large and complex projects – as an example. In particular, the paper also assesses how informal and formal socialization mechanisms are used to facilitate relational capital in such a setting.

Data were collected by two case studies of complex infrastructure projects in a Northern European city. The analysis focuses on how socialization is managed across organizational interfaces within the alliance organization during the project tendering and development phase to create relational capital.

The findings indicate that significant emphasis is put on socialization in project alliances. However, while in the tendering phase both informal and formal socialization mechanisms are used to create relational capital; in the development phase informal socialization mechanisms are associated with higher levels of relational capital and formal socialization mechanisms are used to maintain the level of relational capital.

While operations and supply chain management research argues that socialization is critical to manage organizational interfaces and to create relational capital in buyer-supplier relationships, research has mainly focused on ongoing operations. This study complements the prior research by developing further insight into socialization in the context of temporary operations and organizational settings; such settings create a unique empirical context, posing different managerial challenges as the results also indicate.

Earned value management systems (EVMS), also called integrated project and program management systems, have been greatly examined in the literature, which has typically focused on their technical aspects rather than social. This study aims to hypothesize that improving both the technical maturity of EVMS and the social environment elements of EVMS applications together will significantly impact project performance outcomes. For the first time, empirical evidence supports a strong relationship between EVMS maturity and environment.

Data was collected from 35 projects through four workshops, attended by 31 industry practitioners with an average of 19 years of EVMS experience. These experts, representing 23 organizations, provided over 2,800 data points on sociotechnical integration and performance outcomes, covering projects totaling $21.8 billion. Statistical analyses were performed to derive findings on the impact of technical maturity and social environment on project success.

The results show statistically significant differences in cost growth, compliance, meeting project objectives and business drivers and customer satisfaction, between projects with high EVMS maturity and environment and projects with poor EVMS maturity and environment. Moreover, the technical and social dimensions were found to be significantly correlated.

Key contributions include a novel and tested performance-driven framework to support integrated project management using EVMS. The adoption of this detailed assessment framework by government and industry is driving a paradigm shift in project management of some of the largest and most complex projects in the U.S.; specifically transitioning from a project assessment based upon a binary approach for EVMS technical maturity (i.e. compliant/noncompliant to standards) to a wide-ranging scale (i.e. 0–1,000) across two dimensions.

This paper aims to increase the current understanding of the connection between operational level information and communication technology (ICT) projects and national level digital transformation by researching how project governance structures and practices are applied in an e-government context.

An elaborative qualitative study through public documentary analysis and empirical multi-case research on Finnish central government is used.

The study constructs a multi-level governance structure with three main functions and applies this in an empirical setting. The results also describe how different governance practices and processes, focusing on project portfolio management, are applied vertically across different organizational levels to connect the ICT projects with the national digitalization strategy.

This study integrates project governance and portfolio management knowledge into public sector digitalization, thus contributing to project management, e-government and ICT research streams by improving the current understanding on the governance of ICT projects as part of a larger-scale digitalization. This study also highlights perceived gaps between current governance practices and provides implications to managers and practitioners working in the field to address these gaps.

The purpose of this paper is to reveal the main causes of delays in the projects are from the client (relative importance index (RII)=0.716), labor and equipment (RII=0.701) and contractor (RII=0.698). Hence determining the contractual responsibility of delay is the most likely source of dispute in construction projects and many techniques have been used in the courts to demonstrate the criticalities of a delay event on the project schedule. Therefore, authors try to investigate all process-based techniques of delay claims and evaluated and conformed them with principles by Society of Construction Law (SCL) protocol and Association for the Advancement of Cost Engineering International (AACEI) in order to choose the best techniques based on the specific circumstances of each project.

This section is divided into two distinct parts: refers to the methods used to assess the perceptions of clients, consultants, and contractors on the relative importance of causes of delay in construction industry; and refers to advantages and disadvantages of various techniques used to analyze delays and their conform with SCL protocol. A questionnaire was developed to assess the perceptions of clients, consultants, and contractors on the relative importance of causes of delay in Iranian construction industry. The respondents were asked to indicate their response category on 78 well-recognized construction delay factors identified by authors.

In total, 78 causes of delay were identified through research. The identified causes are combined into seven groups. The field survey included 58 contractors, 55 consultants, and 62 client. Data collected were analyzed by RII and Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). The authors identified main causes of delay and ten most important causes, according to Table AII, from the perspective of three major groups of participants (clients, consultants and contractors). The ranking of categories of causes of delay, according to Table I, were: client-related causes (RII=0.716); labor and equipment category causes (RII=0.701); contractor-related causes (RII=0.698); material-related causes (RII=0.690); design-related causes (RII=0.666); external causes (RII=0.662); and consultant-related causes (RII=0.662). But according to the discussions and given that determining the contractual responsibility of delay is the most likely source of dispute in construction industry and many techniques have been used in the courts to demonstrate the criticalities of a delay event on the project schedule.

All process-based techniques of delay analysis have been present in this paper and categorized in 11 groups. In order to understand the advantages and disadvantages of them by clients, contractor and consultant, a thorough review conducted to reveal the nature of techniques. In the next step, given that selecting the most appropriate technique based on constraints and specific conditions of each project is one of the most important steps to carry out a successful delay analysis. The authors conformed, all process-based techniques of delay analysis, by SCL protocol and AACEI principles. Finally, the result of this match was brought in order to choose the best technique based on the specific circumstances of each project.

Social sustainability is of increasing importance in societal development, which will affect the implementation of construction projects. The social responsibilities for both construction clients and suppliers will be an increasingly relevant part of their business processes. The objective of this study is to evaluate how the procurement process functions today with respect to social considerations.

The empirical data is based on interviews with procurement officials for each studied contract, together with official guidelines concerning social considerations and tender documents for each studied contract. Furthermore, the interviews addressed the level of knowledge that exists with procurement officials concerning social considerations in the procurement of road and railroad projects.

The results showed that there was a positive attitude towards social considerations in the procurement process and that there is a need in the construction sector to consider social issues to a higher degree.

This study is based on six road and five railroad contracts within the Swedish Transport Administration as the client organization.

It was evident that the level of knowledge with individual procurement officials concerning social issues is relatively low and needs to be increased. There is a perception that the management social considerations in construction procurement need to be clarified.

Further research is needed to develop procedures, guidelines, routines and strategies for social considerations in procurement. Another important issue for further research is the development of routines to follow up social terms of contract during the implementation of the project.