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As part of the UK Government’s strategy to address the current shortage of primary school places is the construction of standardised designed schools. The UK Government has been facing an uphill battle to meet the demand for the ever-increasing number of school places it requires. This paper aims to explore the use of standardised school design in addressing the problem of primary school places in the UK.

Due to the exploratory nature of this investigation, a pragmatic research philosophy is utilised and mixed-method data collection techniques are used. Quantitative data collection is in the form of a survey involving 306 construction professionals and stakeholders; this has been consolidated using qualitative data collection in the form of nine purposefully selected semi-structured interviews.

The research highlighted the influence that people and their perceptions have on the successful implementation of standardisation. The results show that a high level of misunderstanding exists around the concept of standardisation and its definition. Standardised design has shown to have a remarkable influence in reducing the cost and time required for delivering the construction of new schools.

Due to the exploratory nature of this research, the results obtained have not been wholly conclusive but have instead provided a contribution to the area of standardisation in construction.

The research has uncovered that, to truly promote and drive standardisation in the delivery of schools, a joint approach is required with designers, contractors, clients and manufacturers, working in partnership to develop successful solutions. The paper will, therefore, help the key stakeholders delivering standardised schools in UK to fully understand the concept and turn the challenges into opportunities.

Against a backdrop of high-stakes assessment policies in the USA, this paper explores the challenges, promises and the “state of the art” with regard to designing standardized achievement tests and educational assessment systems that are instructionally useful. Authors deliberate on the consequences of using inappropriately designed tests, and in particular tests that are insensitive to instruction, for teacher and/or school evaluation purposes.

The method used is a “moderated policy discussion”. The six invited commentaries represent voices of leading education scholars and measurement experts, juxtaposed against views of a prominent leader and nationally recognized teacher from two American education systems. The discussion is moderated with introductory and concluding remarks from the guest editor, and is excerpted from a recent blog published by Education Week. References and author biographies are presented at the end of the article.

In the education assessment profession, there is a promising movement toward more research and development on standardized assessment systems that are instructionally sensitive and useful for classroom teaching. However, the distinctions among different types of tests vis-à-vis their purposes are often unclear to policymakers, educators and other test users, leading to test misuses. The authors underscore issues related to validity, ethics and consequences when inappropriately designed tests are used in high-stakes policy contexts, offering recommendations for the design of instructionally sensitive tests and more comprehensive assessment systems that can serve a broader set of educational evaluation needs. As instructionally informative tests are developed and formalized, their psychometric quality and utility in school and teacher evaluation models must also be evaluated.

Featuring perspectives of scholars, measurement experts and educators “on the ground”, this article presents an open and balanced exchange of technical, applied and policy issues surrounding “instructionally sensitive” test design and use, along with other types of assessments needed to create comprehensive educational evaluation systems.

This chapter develops a conceptual framework to help us position and understand the increasing importance of project-based innovation for industrial organization in the 21st century. It builds on and extends Joan Woodward's (1958 and 1965) pioneering research, which classifies industrial organizations according to the complexity of production technology and volume of output. We suggest that a radical revision of Woodward's framework is required to account for the extensive use of project-based organizations to gain competitive advantage through accelerated innovation and growth in new technologies and markets.

Facility design standardization strategy has considerable advantages, highlighted by its widespread and consistent use in the shipbuilding and manufacturing industries. However, capital projects have failed to realize these benefits. The primary rationale behind this problem is the lack of proper understanding of design standardization, more specifically the benefits and equally importantly, the trade-offs of design standardization in capital projects. Therefore, this study highlights 13 benefits and six trade-offs of standardization in connection to design standardization, along with specific examples.

To achieve the study objectives, the researchers identified the most impactful benefits and trade-offs in terms of economic impact by surveying prominent players in the industry. Furthermore, the researchers examined 43 actual case projects (a case study) executed with the standardization strategy to evaluate the industry's status in terms of the levels of advantage achievement and disadvantage incurrence.

The results of this survey show that design once, reuse multiple times and design and procurement in advance are the most impactful benefits. Similarly, susceptible to changes in the market conditions is one of the top trade-offs that can be incurred in capital projects when implementing standardization. The results also highlight that design once, reuse multiple times is one of the most achieved benefits in standardized capital projects today, while cost of establishing the design standard is the most incurred trade-off.

This study provides important insight into how standardization strategy can be advantageous while also enriching the literature about pitfalls expected from standardization. Moreover, this study's results will help the industrial sector achieve higher levels of design standardization by providing a better understanding of the benefits and trade-offs of design standardization.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how functional and appropriateness arguments influence the adoption of modularity principles during the design of a professional service architecture.

Action design research was conducted to examine the design process of a modular service architecture for specialised elderly care by a multi-professional group. Data collection methods included, partly participatory, observations of the interactions between professionals during the design process, interviews and document analysis. Data analysis focussed on the emerging design choices and the arguments underlying them.

A wide range of both functional and appropriateness considerations were enlisted during the design process. The three core modularity principles were adapted to varying degrees. In terms of the design outcome, the interdependencies between the modularity principles necessitated two trade-offs in the modular design. A third trade-off occurred between modularity and the need for professional inference where services were characterised by uncertainty. Appropriateness was achieved through the professionals reframing and translating the abstract modularity concept to reconcile the concept’s functionality with their professional norms, values and established practices.

The study adds to service modularity theory by formulating three trade-offs that are required in translating the core modularity principles into a functional set of design choices for a multi-professional service environment. Moreover, the inherent intertwinedness of the core modularity principles in professional services requires an iterative design process. Finally, the authors saw that the ambiguity present in the service modularity concept can be used to develop a design that is deemed appropriate by professionals.

This study was motivated by a belief that existing knowledge on management of a contractual claim in international contracting practice is different from a standardised local practice. The paper is aimed at building competence for managing contractual claims in a standardised practice.

Comparative studies of British and Finnish contracting practices were used to determine the reason why claims are not pronounced in a standardised practice. Empirical study via direct interviews and questionnaires of a Finnish‐based contractor operating in the Russian markets was used. The players are three‐dimensional in nature where the client, consultants, and contractor come from different countries/practices and two of the projects studied were joint ventures.

The findings show the effects of: legal system, procurement methods, standardised practice and size of the market on the management of contractual claims. The remedial measures suggested include: operational management, i.e. learning through personal contacts, and management competence development of employees by learning through proper communication and education programmes in a form of continuing professional development.

Management of claims in the construction industry is vital to a successful implementation of the project. It brings about a fair dealing between the project owner and the contractor, improves contractor's cashflow and discourages abandonment of project and disputes. Lack of knowledge in managing claims constitutes a threat to successful implementation of project. The engagement of an expert and knowledge transfer through joint ventures/partnerships are suggested as solutions.

This study aims to investigate the impacts of product modularity (PM) and multiskilled employees (MEs) on new product development (NPD) outcomes and explore the moderating effect of supply chain involvement.

The authors used data collected from 317 manufacturers to empirically examine the conceptual model and conducted hierarchical regression analysis to test the hypotheses.

The results reveal that PM significantly improves NPD outcomes. The relationship between PM/MEs and NPD outcomes is strengthened when the level of supplier involvement is high, whereas the relationship between MEs and NPD outcomes is weakened when the level of customer involvement is high.

First, this study only focuses on PM and MEs as two types of modular designs. Second, the inter-relationship between modular designs and supply chain involvement might be contingent. Third, the authors use cross-sectional data that cannot reflect causal effects of modularity on NPD outcomes.

The findings contribute to the understanding of the alignment between modular designs and supply chain involvement considering NPD outcomes. This study also contributes to the concept of modularity by identifying MEs as a type of modular design.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the hedging efficiency (HE) of weather index insurances (WII) based on a whole-farm approach. The aim is to identify how different types of WII affect the economic performance risk of real farms in the light of the heterogeneity of farm operations and natural conditions.

Using historic simulation, the HE of various hedging strategies is computed for 20 farms in regions with moderate natural conditions. A priori defined “standardized” WII and hedge ratios as well as ex post “optimized” strategies are analyzed. The latter is identified through a risk programming approach that determines the strike level and hedge ratio that would have minimized the volatility of each farm’s historic total gross margins (TGMs) ex post.

(i) The correlations between the weather indexes and the yields of the farms’ main crop (wheat) do not provide useful insights regarding the whole-farm HE because farms’ performance risk is considerably affected by volatile factors other than wheat yield; (ii) Standardized WII are ill-suited to hedge performance risk for the majority of studied farms; (iii) A considerable positive whole-farm HE could have been obtained on average if farmers had been able to use the “optimized” risk management strategy. Using farm-specific information thus seems to be essential for identifying meaningful hedging strategies.

This study provides added value by analyzing the HE of WII for 20 German crop farms in “moderate” regions. The results show that exemplary tests of WII in extreme conditions provide no decision support for farmers in other regions.

Through an overview of Goal's post tsunami shelter and reconstruction programme in Sri Lanka this study aims to highlight how design and implementation approaches had to continuously evolve in order to respond to changes in pace, priorities and policy as relief moved into recovery then permanent rehabilitation.

The study begins by describing the Buffer Zone Policy that prohibited construction within a certain distance from the sea and how the policy impeded the construction of permanent housing in some areas through lack of suitable relocation sites. Then using transitional shelter as an example, the effects of the persistence of the policy when most actors anticipated change can be seen in modifications to shelters driven mainly by comfort criteria as their occupancy had to be extended from an initially predicted six month period to around two years.

Following this, an overview of the permanent housing programme shows how an owner driven housing approach was chosen as an appropriate means of provision and how the process was developed through a local partnership. In this programme the owners' capacity to design and manage their own house construction was developed with the understanding that houses could be incrementally extended by the owner following the completion of the programme. Then, as the late change in the Buffer Zone Policy resulted in a sudden up-scaling of the project on a very limited time-frame, the study shows how, whilst still catering for individual aspirations and personal "ownership" in design and implementation, standardised designs were introduced to speed up the building process.

The study concludes by emphasising the need for flexibility in design and implementation in order to provide the best service to affected people within the ever-changing environment of disaster response.