Search results

The purpose of this paper is to show how effective project team communications is one of the major challenges to a construction project's success. The success of large‐scale construction projects is critical to Chinese economy. The purposes of the research are to grasp the current status of communications in large‐scale construction projects in China and lay a basis for further research on project communications.

A survey was conducted by postal questionnaire and telephone.

Through analyzing the data obtained from the survey, the communication problems in large‐scale construction projects in China are exposed. The roots of the problems are summarized as lack of good communication mechanism, weak organizational structures of construction teams, lack of uniform standards for construction information, and lack of support for advanced communication technologies.

The paper presents the directions for further research to improve communications in large‐scale construction projects in China.

Large‐scale construction projects pose several challenges for successful completion. There seems to be no general agreement among researchers on what are the critical success factors (CSFs) on construction projects. Success factors vary across various projects, let alone countries. This paper attempts to elicit the perception of construction professionals on CSFs appertaining to large‐scale construction projects in Thailand.

Questionnaire surveys and interviews were conducted with project managers, deputy project managers, and line managers to gather their perception on CSFs.

Results of 76 questionnaire surveys and 35 interviews revealed that factors related to project planning and control, project personnel, and involvement of client were perceived to be critical for the success of large‐scale construction projects in Thailand. Participants also showed their high concern for sufficient resources, adequate communication, mutual understanding of stakeholders on project goals, and award of bids to the “right” designers and contractors.

The study was conducted on a single large‐scale construction project in Thailand, and hence, findings should be interpreted in context of Thai construction industry. The study also did not consider any specific procurement methods under which the project was being developed. Participants were asked about their general perception about CSFs on large‐scale construction projects.

Results from this study can be used as guidelines to ascertain CSFs on other large‐scale projects in Thailand. Project managers can also use this study to evaluate their current project and compare the perceived and real success factors for knowledge management exercises.

The paper captures the perception of construction professionals about CSFs in large‐scale projects in Thailand. It also presents a model for conceptual illustration of CSFs by differentiating the process domain from performance domain.

The paper's aim is to establish the relationships between the formalisation of construction firms on the level of coordination and effectiveness of refurbishment projects.

The approach takes the form of a literature review of published journals and textbooks, a postal questionnaire survey with managing directors, project managers and contract managers. About 94 construction companies were selected for the postal questionnaire survey. In total, 54 (57 percent) of returned questionnaires were considered to be useful for statistical analysis.

Highly formalised construction firms require higher level of coordination than lowly formalised construction firms. In highly formalised construction firms, the participants managing refurbishment projects tend to circumvent formalisation by having more informal interactions, which contradicts the needs of the firms. The effectiveness of highly formalised construction firms is not significantly better than lowly formalised construction firms.

The study is limited to medium and large refurbishment projects, with contract value above £500,000.

The paper highlights the need to reduce formalisation in managing refurbishment projects. Large construction firms, which tend to be highly formalised should set up autonomous refurbishment division to manage refurbishment projects.

The paper shows that the formalisation of the organizational structure of construction firms affects the level of coordination of refurbishment projects.

This paper aims to analyse the factors affecting the performance of large construction projects in Sri Lanka. The causes, impacts and mitigations in association with the critical factors are explored and discussed.

The research focuses on the evaluation and perspectives of clients and contractors of large projects in Sri Lanka. Combined quantitative and qualitative methods were applied in this research. Initially, a questionnaire survey was conducted with clients and contractors involved in large projects to evaluate the factors affecting the performance of projects and to identify the ten most critical factors. Interviews with the clients and contractors of three large projects were conducted to examine the causes and impacts of the critical factors and the approaches used to mitigate them.

Significant differences in the factors were observed for more than 40 per cent of the total factors under study, the contractors assigning more weight to most of the factors than the clients. The study identified nine internal factors and one external factor as the critical factors. Of these, seven were related to the contractors, which suggested that the contractors have greater roles in defining performance. Lack of management and technical skills of the parties involved, human capacity, lack of understanding and knowledge of the local context, changes in government policies and political interference were identified as significant causes of the critical factors.

The study analysed the factors affecting the performance of large projects in Sri Lanka, which, at the time of research, had just ended a 26-year-long civil war and was pushing the construction of large projects to be competitive. The challenges faced in this effort were explored as lessons learnt that might improve the efficiency and effectiveness of infrastructure development in Sri Lanka. The combined quantitative and qualitative methods applied in this study are expected to provide new insights in the project performance research, especially the interviews of the critical factors to gain an understanding on how the factors occurred and manifested themselves in real projects. The findings are, however, expected to be applicable to other developing countries that are currently aggressively developing their large infrastructure.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact that cost overruns and time delays exert on large public construction projects to clarify how past and current research regard factors causing cost overruns and time delays in large public construction projects.

This paper, which is based on an analysis of a literature selection consisting of 40 journal articles, investigates and ranks the occurrence of and the explanations for cost overruns and time delays in large public construction projects. The study makes use of a kiviat diagram/radar chart in order to visualize multivariate data.

Aggregated rankings of important causes of cost overruns and time delays are reported. These show a strong emphasis on the management aspect as a primary cause of cost overruns and delays. Additionally, there seems to be a trend toward deemphasizing the role of financial considerations in explaining cost overruns and delays. It is argued that there needs to be a more rigorous assessment of the impact that each factor has on cost increases and delays based on factual observed data as opposed to retrospective accounts from questionnaire respondents.

Only public construction projects have been considered. The results will not be directly applicable to privately funded construction projects and/or projects of a smaller size.

The use of trend data, as illustrated in a kiviat diagram, showing how different ranking factors causing cost overruns and time delays has changed in importance over time.

The complexities in strait-crossing cable-stayed bridge project are increasing the risks. This study aims to identify and analyze the significant and worth-considered construction risks of the first, biggest and longest spanned strait-crossing bridge project in Indonesia.

As many as 32 risk events were identified and determined as the risks that exist and can be represented in the Suramadu bridge project context. Data was collected through a design-based questionnaire disseminated to experts involved in the project as well as semi-formal interviews. Several quantitative methods were applied to analyze the significant risks, such as relative importance index, Spearman’s rank correlation test and Mann–Whitney U test.

The analyses reveal that “unexpected natural behavior” confirmed by both contractor and consultant parties is the most significant and crucial risk event. Another risk event found to be significant is the “delayed payment.” On the other hand, it is also found that several risks within the legal category are found to be less significant compared to other major risk events.

The results of the present research should be interpreted in the context of several limitations. Given these possible concerns regarding the generalizability of the findings, along with the relatively low rate of participants in the current research, additional studies are needed to provide a more complete picture of stakeholder perceptions who are involved directly in the construction environment as well as to identify more construction risks specifically in the large-scale bridge project.

This study has provided fundamental contributions to the body of knowledge and practical implication to promote and assist decision-makers toward developing a comprehensive risk assessment of a large-scale bridge project.

The analyses of outcomes and discussion, as well as the findings of this research, have shed light on the construction risks understanding, which contributes to delivering a theoretical framework for achieving large-scale bridge project success.

For large projects, project segmentation and planning the size of contract packages in construction bids is a complex and critical issue. Due to the nature of construction projects, which frequently have large budgets, long durations and many activities with complex procedures, project segmentation involves complicated decision-making. To fill this gap, this study aims to develop an integrated model for planning project segmentation.

The proposed model integrates a simulation and multiple attribute decision-making method. The simulation is used to evaluate the bidding outcome of various project segmentations. The owner can then determine the bid-price behavior of contractors in response to varying work package sizes. The multiple attribute decision-making method is used to select the optimal segmentation solution from the simulated scenarios.

The proposed model is applied to a large road preservation project in Indonesia and incorporates bid participants and market conditions. The model provides seven scenarios for segmentation. The range of scenarios captures increasing competitiveness in the construction with the average bid price becoming gradually more beneficial for the owner. The model also utilizes a multiple attribute decision-making method to select the optimum scenario for the owner.

This study presents an applicable model for project segmentation that is useful for both project owners and contractors. By utilizing the proposed model, a project owner can segment a large project into smaller contract packages to create improved project pricing.

In recent decades, infrastructure has continued to develop as an important basis for social development and people's lives. Resource management of these large-scale projects has been immensely concerned because dozens of construction enterprises (CEs) often work together. In this situation, resource collaboration among enterprises has become a key measure to ensure project implementation. Thus, this study aims to propose a systematic multi-agent resource collaborative decision-making optimization model for large projects from a matching perspective.

The main contribution of this work was an advancement of the current research by: (1) generalizing the resource matching decision-making problem and quantifying the relationship between CEs. (2) Based on the matching domain, the resource input costs and benefits of each enterprise in the associated group were comprehensively analyzed to build the mathematical model, which also incorporated prospect theory to map more realistic decisions. (3) According to the influencing factors of resource decision-making, such as cost, benefit and attitude of decision-makers, determined the optimal resource input in different situations.

Numerical experiments were used to verify the effectiveness of the multi-agent resource matching decision (MARMD) method in this study. The results indicated that this model could provide guidance for optimal decision-making for each participating enterprise in the resource association group under different situations. And the results showed the psychological preference of decision-makers has an important influence on decision performance.

While the MARMD method has been proposed in this research, MARMD still has many limitations. A more detailed matching relationship between different resource types in CEs is still not fully analyzed, and relevant studies about more accurate parameters of decision-makers’ psychological preferences should be conducted in this area in the future.

Compared with traditional projects, large-scale engineering construction has the characteristics of huge resource consumption and more participants. While decision-makers can determine the matching relationship between related enterprises, this is ambiguous and the wider range will vary with more participants or complex environment. The MARMD method provided in this paper is an effective methodological tool with clearer decision-making positioning and stronger actual operability, which could provide references for large-scale project resource management.

Large-scale engineering is complex infrastructure projects that ensure national security, increase economic development, improve people's lives and promote social progress. During the implementation of large-scale projects, CEs realize value-added through resource exchange and integration. Studying the optimal collaborative decision of multi-agent resources from a matching perspective can realize the improvement of resource transformation efficiency and promote the development of large-scale engineering projects.

The current research on engineering resources decision-making lacks a matching relationship, which leads to unclear decision objectives, ambiguous decision processes and poor operability decision methods. To solve these issues, a novel approach was proposed to reveal the decision mechanism of multi-agent resource optimization in large-scale projects. This paper could bring inspiration to the research of large-scale project resource management.

In a construction project, “participants’ satisfaction” is one of the main dimensions used for measuring the successfulness of a project. Designers perform a major role in attaining the project goals and managing project complexity during production. The purpose of this paper is to examine the designers’ performance as evaluated by the main participants: the client, the project consultant/manager and the main contractor, and to identify the main success factors of designer performance using the participants’ evaluation. The study also aims to examine how the economic size of a project affects the project participants’ assessment of the designer’s performance. It is assumed that as the size of a project increases, so does the complexity of the project, which will affect the scope of work and demands on the designers’ operational performance for the specific project level.

The Finnish project evaluation and benchmark database was used in this study as empirical data. The quantitative data consists of surveys on the project level and are based on a multi-dimensional standard evaluation wherein the main participants evaluate each other’s performances. The client, project consultant and main contractor evaluated the designer’s performance. The data of the study consisted of a total of 892 evaluations. ANOVA analysis was used to examine the differences between the project participants’ assessments based upon the different economic sizes of the projects.

Contractors were satisfied with the designers’ performance in small projects, whereas the client and the project consultant/manager rated the designers’ performance most successful in large projects. This result may be due to small projects are typically simple and less complex, in which case design solutions are generally well-defined. Nonetheless, the participants’ level of satisfaction follows the same factors. The main problems in the designers’ performance were related to the design content: the flawlessness and comprehensiveness, as well as the compatibility and consistency of designs. These factors were emphasized particularly in the client’s low satisfaction of the designer’s performance. However, project participants were satisfied with the collaboration with designers; however, room for improvement could be found in internal communication and collaboration within the design teams. The findings illustrated that the assessment of the success rate of a project was party-specific, which was clearly affected by the size of the project, as large projects appeared to be more complex than smaller ones.

The findings suggested that there is a need to develop project-specific practices in managing multidisciplinary design teams. Additionally, particularly in large projects, designers should focus more on solving problems and design requirements occurring at the construction site. However, this should be implemented in such a way that this does not interfere with the design activities conducted with the client and project management. While client satisfaction is low in the small projects, designers should focus more on customer-oriented methods to serve client needs better.

In construction project management studies, there is a need to measure the importance that various participants assign to different success factors. Since project success factors depend on project type, a more project-specific approach is suggested to identify the main parameters for measuring project success. This study provides a holistic approach of the designers’ performance, which contributes to the theory of project success and designers’ performance improvement.

The purpose of this study is to investigate and rank the critical factors influencing the bid/no bid criteria and their importance in the Australian construction industry.

The research study has been undertaken by conducting an extensive literature review on bid/no bid decision-making criteria. As a result, the researchers identified 26 most common bid/no bid decision-making criteria that are accordingly grouped into five distinct categories, namely, “project”, “market”,“contractor”, “client” and “contract”. The literature review was followed by a national survey that was designed and utilised by the researchers to collect data for this purpose. The survey was sent to potential 450 Australian construction companies in various locations and responses were received from 81 Australian construction companies. Response data were subjected to descriptive and inferential statistics. Kruskal Wallis one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was applied to detect significant differences between the mean score grouped according to the organisation size (contract value).

The descriptive and empirical analysis demonstrated a disparity of ranking of the 26 bid/no bid criteria factors among the groups; however no statistically significant differences among the 26 bid/no criteria factors despite the absolute differences in the rankings and mean scores in the following four factors: (1) “bidding condition”, (2) “strength/weaknesses”, (3) “contract payment terms” and (4) “number of competitors/bidders”. Based on the overall sample, the highly ranked four factors were “client financial capability”, “project risk”, “project future benefits and profitability” and “number of competitors/bidders”. The following were the least ranked: “contractors’ financial situation”, “project duration” and “contractors’ material availability”. “Client financial capability”and “project risk” were jointly ranked as the most important by large, whereas “client financial capability” was also rated highly for smaller Australian construction contractors (ACCs). The medium ACCs had “project risk”as highly ranked.

The majority of the participants were small construction contractors in Australia. The reason is that the researchers were not aware of the contractors’ size prior to inviting them for participation in the research study. Second, the findings may not generalise to other industries or to organisations operating in other countries.

The identified “bid/no bid criteria” increase the awareness of existing decision-making practices and play a critical role in the future decisions of the construction companies, where decision makers need to evaluate the next opportunities encountered. Furthermore, knowledge and possession of these identified “bid/no bid” criteria would enable contractors to select a project with a higher probability of success in the future, which will accordingly result in long-term financial benefits and higher performance. Finally, the awareness of these factors could contribute to changing the contractor’s behaviours when bidding in a competitive environment or market conditions.

The study contributes to the body of knowledge on tendering and bidding practices among contractors in Australia, an area previously under explored. Second, this study provides some insights on the factors influencing the bid/no bid decisions among the ACCs.