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Effective procurement of infrastructure is partly dependent on infrastructure procurement personnel having the skills that are important for the discharge of their role. Addressing the infrastructure deficits in developing countries, therefore, calls for an understanding of the skills that are important for the discharge of the roles of public personnel that are involved in infrastructure procurement. This study aims to investigate these skills from the perspective of public infrastructure procurement personnel in the sub-Saharan African region.

A questionnaire survey of procurement personnel yielded 590 useable responses, which were analysed using t-tests and exploratory factor analysis (EFA).

EFA established eight key components of important infrastructure procurement skills to include skills related to: project success factors; social and environmental sustainability; marketing and e-procurement; project phase management, the application of procurement laws and procedures; soft skills, ICT and communication; and data analysis and team building.

The findings are crucial in developing infrastructure procurement capacity building programmes that would be appropriate for infrastructure procurement personnel in developing country contexts. Infrastructure procurement personnel ought to engage more in capacity development training that is aligned to enhancing skills within the eight components.

The purpose of this paper is to attempt to shed light on procurement innovation by examining two state-of-the-art procurement systems in China – an agent-construction system (ACS or in Chinese Dai Jian Zhi) and public-private partnership (PPP), with special consideration given to the systems’ particular political, economic, social, technological, environmental, and legal (PESTEL) background.

The paper does so by using content analyses, semi-structured interviews, and a “PESTEL-Procurement Innovation” framework.

It is found that PPP has not been as popular as expected, while the ACS, which is little known to the international construction management community, is widespread in China. The study of ACS and PPP further reveals that congruence between a procurement system and its external PESTEL conditions is essential for procurement innovation.

The “PESTEL-Procurement Innovation” framework could be a useful tool for devising procurement innovation; although there are many questions yet to be answered by further research.

The paper provides useful insights into procurement innovation, particularly when governments worldwide are searching for innovative procurement systems to help deliver public projects and services.

The paper possesses originality in that it tackles procurement innovation, an area that is under researched in construction management. It exhorts the re-connection between a procurement system and its external PESTEL conditions for devising bona fide procurement innovations.

The purpose of this paper is to report on a research thesis that investigates the role of procurement practices in effective implementation of infrastructure projects in a developing country, i.e. Pakistan. The research investigated and explored the issues and barriers to effective implementation of different procurement methods, the environment and its suitability for implementing different forms of procurement in context of public sector in Pakistan.

The research was carried out in two stages in the first stage archival analysis was conducted of government documents, reports including reports by international organisations, policy documents and literature. During the second stage case studies were selected based on archival analysis. The unit of analysis is the basis for the case and for this study, it was the procurement of infrastructure projects in public sector in Pakistan and that was the boundary of the research. Eight project case studies were selected from six public sector organizations (organizational case studies). A total of 24 respondents participated from these six organisations.

The research has identified the different procurement choices and reasons for a particular choice, the issues in procurement choice and the issues in procurement implementation in the public sector organisations in Pakistan. It has also described the impact of procurement practice on successful project outcomes. As a result multiple issues have been identified which affects the choice of procurement such as the need for efficiency and finances, client objectives, timely policy decisions, clarity of clients needs, delays in bidding and response, delays in approvals, proposal and bid evaluation procedures, need for relaxation of rules and project characteristics. The major barriers and constraints to implementation of procurement have been reported to be regulatory and legal, risks and contract management, principles of procurement, political, culture, inter and intra organisational issues, conditions of the country, lack of understanding, land acquisition, project revenue and finance issues. Procurement had a direct impact on successful outcomes of the project, the procurement systems in these organisations had a direct relationship and impact on performance and success of the project.

As a result of this analysis a vivid big picture of road map of the ongoing processes and practice of procurement in public sector in Pakistan has been created which vividly portrays the issues and barriers of the procurement practice in Pakistan.

The ability of an organization to observe varying demands and efficiently meet them can be described as agility. Project procurement management (PPM) in the past was stable as things did not change very often and were very predictable. Due to hyper-competition, less predictable market and exponential innovation, the existing PPM becomes very unstable which marks the requirement of an agile model to manage procurement projects effectively. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

For achieving the improvements, various barriers to improving agility in PPM were identified from the literature and experts’ review, followed by obtaining quantified impacts of identified barriers from the experts using the Delphi technique. Finally, interpretive structural modeling along with Matrice d’ Impacts Croises Multiplication Appliqué an Classement analysis was used to analyze the interactions among barriers to prioritize and strategize their mitigation.

As per the analysis, the lack of top management alignment and commitment, lack of digital strategy, lack of new technology competencies and inefficiencies of financial factors were the most critical barriers that would come across while improving agility in PPM for any organization. Industries should have a stable, well-established and supportive top management that has a vision for digital transformation along with upgrading the companies’ technology layer for automating most of the manual processes to have intelligent decision-making capability.

Industries need to be agile in their operations for being more competitive and responsive to the market. PPM being the most critical part of the entire value chain needs to be agile in the first place. The strategies developed as an output of this research can be utilized by industries for improving agility in their business processes.

Discusses the issue of developing a project design that adequately addresses the practicality of delivering integrated construction knowledge and experience in planning, engineering, procurement and field operations. There are few practical examples in the literature that explain how non‐traditional construction project procurement approaches can be utilised to organise an integrated project management system incorporating occupational health and safety (OHS), environmental management (EM) and quality management (QM) systems. Reports on a case study that helps fill that gap. Shows how the adoption of a design and construct procurement approach, together with appropriate management techniques, on a successful major freeway project in Melbourne, Australia, was driven by a sound construction planning process, and integrated the construction planning system with OHS, EM and QM systems.

Power plant projects are very complex and encounter serious cost overruns worldwide. Their cost overrun risks are not independent but interrelated in many cases, having structural relationships among each other. The purpose of this study is, therefore, to establish the complex structural relationships of risks involved.

In total, 76 published articles from the previous literature are reviewed using the content analysis method. Three risk networks in different phases of power plant projects are depicted based on literature review and case studies. The possible methods of solving these risk networks are also discussed.

The study finds critical cost overrun risks and develops risk networks for the procurement, civil and mechanical works of power plant projects. It identifies potential models to assess cost overrun risks based on the developed risk networks. The literature review also revealed some research gaps in the cost overrun risk management of power plants and similar infrastructure projects.

This study will assist project risk managers to understand the potential risks and their relationships to prevent and mitigate cost overruns for future power plant projects. It will also facilitate decision-makers developing a risk management framework and controlling projects’ cost overruns.

The study presents conceptual risk networks in different phases of power plant projects for comprehending the root causes of cost overruns. A comparative discussion of the relevant models available in the literature is presented, where their potential applications, limitations and further improvement areas are discussed to solve the developed risk networks for modeling cost overrun risks.

One of the major reasons for ineffective project delivery in the Nigerian construction industry is the improper assessment of risk factors. As a result, the industry continues to suffer poor performance with many projects failing to meet time and cost targets. This paper identifies the risk factors inherent in different building procurement methods and assesses their perceived relative importance with a view to evaluating their impact on project cost. The paper reports on a study carried out through a questionnaire survey of professionals within the construction industry in order to asses the relative importance placed on risk factors. Responses from the survey were analysed using relative importance index for the purpose of evaluating the impact of risk on projects cost. Data were collected on selected completed projects and analysed using frequencies, mean values and relative important index. The main risk factors identified are finance and political influence. A model was developed by relating the variation between the initial contract estimate and the actual project cost to the risk variables. From the analysis, the percentages of projects cost overrun due to the impact of risk were established for each procurement method investigated. The paper recommends that contingency additions should be based on the procurement method used.

This paper presents the results of a literature survey developed to support a proposed model of the Critical Success Factors (CSFs) likely to impact the success of e-Procurement initiatives in the public sector. It identifies a number of relevant variables for each CSF and presents a model for future research. It also analyses the relative importance of different CSFs and observes that organization and management factors are the most important category for success of e-Procurement initiatives. If e-Procurement initiatives in the public sector are to assist the development of e-Procurement across the information economy, there should be wider discussion and agreement on what constitutes the relevant CSFs and how the achievement of success can be assessed.

The purpose of the work presented here is to assess the cost management practices of civil engineering organisations in Nigeria, with an overall aim of developing a generic cost management process map. The first objective is to compare existing frameworks theoretically to highlight their strengths and weaknesses. The second objective is to use the findings of the first objective to assess or benchmark the developed process map obtained from the multiple cases. The third objective is to compare the generic process map with the traditional building cost management process map to evaluate the strengths and shortcomings of the generic process map, which resulted in conclusions and recommendations made at the end of the research.

Data for the work was collected via semi-structured interviews, review of literature and official documents of the civil engineering organisations visited. To achieve the stated objectives, comparative analysis technique was used to compare existing frameworks on cost management to obtain the basis to benchmark the generic process map. The single case narrative technique was used to present each case; and the cross-case synthesis technique was used to present the multiple cases on each cost management process examined. Then, process maps were deployed to represent the homogeneous sets of civil engineering organisations, out of which the generic process map was developed. Comparative analysis was again deployed to compare the generic process map with the traditional building process map of cost management practice to evaluate the findings.

It was found out that the generic civil engineering process map is not as detailed and effective as the building process map in providing best value for money, accurate early cost estimates, accurate cost certainty and post-contract cost control.

This research study provides an industrial impetus to push for the involvement of more quantity surveyors (QS) as cost management process owners in the procurement of civil engineering projects in Nigeria, hence encouraging government’s efforts in the enforcement of more accurate project cost estimates and promoting the QS’s project-specific advice on capital, operational, maintenance and life cycle costs.

This paper aims to analyse the findings of the relevant studies, to summarise what has been done in this area, to direct future research and to improve private finance initiative (PFI) practice. PFI is a new form of contracting out public facilities to the private sector, where facility management was integrated with construction. There have been a large number of academic papers published on this subject; however, there is a lack of a systematic review of the PFI-related studies.

The literature search focused on international peer-reviewed and published literature, with relevance to PFI. The search of literature, following the method of Tang et al. (2010) and Al-Sharif and Kaka (2004), involved the titles, keywords and abstracts, from some major electronic databases (Web of Science, Engineering Village, Science Direct (Elsevier) and Springer Link) of publications published between 1992 and 2011. The data were classified into six categories for further analysis.

As a new way to procure public facility management, PFI projects have unique characteristics in comparison to conventional construction procurement. The review of the literature regarding PFI is important in terms of summarising the key findings and suggestions of studies for industry practitioners, as well as forecasting the future academic research trends in this area. The number of research works on PFI increased quickly in recent years; however, the review discovered there were still some issues not yet covered in the literature.

This review is not exhaustive in nature, as the criteria in selecting research papers only included English-written, peer-reviewed journals from some major electronic literature databases. This is the limitation of the research. Further review on a wider range of literature is recommended for researchers.

Since PFI was introduced to the construction industry to fund infrastructure 20 years ago in the UK, it has gained interests from scholars. In this new form of contracting out public facilities to the private sector, facility management was integrated with construction. There have been a large number of academic papers published on this subject; however, there is a lack of a systematic review of the PFI studies.