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Targets set out by state institutions, with respect to supplying water to deprived communities, seem to be idealistic and not realistic. Study envisioned to assess challenges of financing water infrastructure projects, and determines the role of the state towards infrastructure development by holistically planning and engaging with the private sector.

The study adopted a quantitative approach, whereby a questionnaire survey was conducted among different stakeholders involved in water infrastructure projects in South Africa. Data gathered were analysed using percentages, mean item score and standard deviation.

The study revealed that most challenges affecting the success of the financing of water infrastructure projects in South Africa are corruption, hostility towards private participation, cost recovery constraints, high fiscal deficits by state government, unreliable planning and procurement processes, and a rapid increasing number of municipalities that lack technical and administrative capacity to plan implement, operate and maintain water assets.

This research paper investigates projects’ financing challenges with a broad inspection on the role of the public sector. The apparent role of the international structures such as OECD, IMF and World Bank had no influence in the study. From the findings, it is clear that the central government and state institutions lack the necessary resources to accelerate infrastructure development, water infrastructure in particular. The study, thus, recommends a complete expansion and development of state capacity as well as improved collaborations with the private sector to drive the success delivery of services to the public.

Improved and flexible regulations and legislative guidelines are required to ensure that both sectors fulfil their side of the bargain, with an ultimate goal of meeting the predetermined targets of supplying adequate water to the deprived communities.

Construction projects operate within a risky environment. It materialises as delays, which must be prevented or mitigated to avoid becoming amplified into late completion. But previous research has largely ignored how structural complexity of the underlying network schedules shapes their resilience.

This research hypothesizes that schedule structure plays a vital role in its ability to absorb or propagate delays. The impact of activity-level local risk factors is represented via activity duration distributions, i.e. probability density functions. The impact of project-level global risk factors is more challenging because they arise via interactions between multiple activities.

Modelling resilience to local and global risk factors can employ a matrix approach. Simulation shows that delay amplification depends on local structure, not global complexity.

Criticality had merely relied upon a single deterministic analysis of a network schedule to categorize activities as having zero or nonzero float from fixed relative duration a dependency structure. Repeated probabilistic analysis with sampled durations gives criticality indices of activities. This research limits itself to network schedules with point-wise relations between activities.

Managers can use this knowledge to develop schedules that protect their expected project duration with a suitable structural complexity.

Contributions to the body of knowledge are as follows: It converts the dependency structure into a reachability matrix and adds a correlation matrix to capture how the predecessor performance may impact its successors. It correlates criticality of activities with structural complexity indices. And it ranks activities objectively by their cruciality, i.e. potential delay propagation.

The purpose of the study is to explore the dominant ideas in research on the management of time in construction. The focus of research has been to improve techniques for optimising the timing and sequence of activities.

A critical review of research on construction time management, challenging the typical focus. We examine the assumptions different authors make, underline the limitations of the dominant research approaches and examine the prospects for developing a new approach to researching these issues.

The dominant approach in literature focuses on unique activity traits in construction planning and measurable patterns between time-related variables. This assumes that time in construction can be managed by changing the way activities are calculated. These approaches have not been correlated with improvement in performance. Social practice theory may help to explain how programmes figure as one of many objects used during construction.

The focus is on reviewing indicative literature from key journals in construction management. The implication is that research is needed about how such documents are used in practice, which goes further than optimising plans in theory.

Future research could focus on understanding the context of construction planning practice and shift the debate from a focus on optimisation to practice.

An interpretivist approach with a focus on how tools such as planning documents are used on site. Social practice theory may provide a clearer explanation of the place of construction planning within the practice of construction management. This could provide solutions that deal effectively with stakeholder expectations around timely completion of construction projects.

The purpose of the paper is 1) to address the importance of contingency at the right level when defining project control baseline, including cost reserves / “room to manoeuvre” and 2) present proactive uncertainty management as a regime to ensure cost effective management of project reserves and contribute to project success.

The paper is a combination of literature study and quantitative research on how contingency develops during the lifetime of a case project. The investigation into the case project includes document study into quantitative material from the case project. The combination of empirical material and theory makes the discussion robust.

Unrealistic low cost uncertainty will lead to unrealistic low contingency. The case study from a Norwegian mega project shows a contingency of 15 per cent in addition to expected costs. The case study shows that by continuous opportunity management and risk reduction, the needs for management reserves are systematically reduced and the contingency is controlled.

This research is limited to one case study. A higher number of cases are necessary to generalise the findings. However, the authors would claim that the systematic mapping of need for management reserve towards the project contingency, and a continuous uncertainty management system will help to obtain cost effective management. The findings from the case study could be applied on similar cases.

The case study shows a way of setting contingencies and managing contingencies through systematic uncertainty management.

Improved management of project provisions will increase the value of future projects.

This paper aims to report on a new form of project insurance in the UK construction designed to improve collaborative working among project participants. It aims to examine the interprofessional collaborative endeavour under the new insurance arrangements, drawing on a structuration model of interdisciplinary collaboration developed in the field of healthcare studies.

The research employed a longitudinal, action research approach with participant observation. A novel element included a project facilitator as part of the action research team. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected using semi-structured interviews with close scrutiny of the documented project record.

Project structure emerges as a more important element in the collaboration process than is typically recognised in practice-based studies; the analysis revealing the interplay of structure, the socialising processes of participants and how facilitation helps develop interdependence among project participants. The analysis provides a basis for understanding collaboration on the trial project.

The project provides a unique context for the examination of collaboration under the new project insurance arrangements. The results have implications for the study of collaboration in highlighting the important relationship between project structure, collaboration and facilitation.

Understanding how interdependency is developed through structure, the socialising processes of collaborators and facilitation has important implications for those concerned with designing project arrangements and managing collaborative processes.

The paper reports on the first full trial of new project insurance arrangements in the UK. It highlights the significance of project structure, and the interplay between collaborators’ emerging practices and facilitation.