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Safety planning in construction project management is separated from other planning functions, such as scheduling. This separation creates difficulties for safety engineers to analyse what, when, why and where safety measures are needed for preventing accidents. Another problem occurs due to the conventional practice of representing project designs using two‐dimensional (2D) drawings. In this practice, an engineer has to convert the 2D drawings into three‐dimensional (3D) mental pictures which is a tedious task. Since this conversion is already difficult, combining these 2D drawings with safety plans increases the difficulty. In order to address the problems, 4DCAD‐Safety is proposed. This paper discusses the design and development of 4DCAD‐Safety application and testing its usefulness in terms of assisting users in analysing what, when, where and why safety measures are needed.

Recent trends in the provision of infrastructure development indicate that the private sector is playing an increasingly important role in the procurement process. This trend has partly arisen out of a necessity for the development of infrastructure to be undertaken at a rate that maintains and allows growth. This has become a major challenge for many countries where it is evident that these provisions cannot be met by government alone. The emergence of Build‐Own‐Operate‐Transfer (BOOT) schemes as a response to this challenge provides a means for developing the infrastructure of a country without directly impacting upon the government's budgetary constraints. The concepts of BOOT are without doubt extremely complex arrangements, which bring to the construction sector risks not experienced previously. This paper examines perceptions of BOOT schemes in order to develop a framework of critical success factors. The developed framework is then tested against a case study of Stadium Australia, and the outcomes of the comparison are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to examine trust relationships in managing construction projects to determine the trust situations, the psychological perception of trust relationship, and the underlying value of trust. Association is made to project management, project team and strategy implementation for managing construction projects.

A case study approach is adopted to collect qualitative data from ten projects. The collected data are analysed with content analysis and discussed with a flow model and interactive model approach.

Using the real‐life evidence, the findings revealed a diversified meaning of trust, which subsequently confirm the multi‐faceted nature of trust with qualitative data analysis.

Further research is necessary for multi‐party working as this working style dominates the construction industry and greatly affects the overall project performance, and the effect of such is particularly obvious when managing differences among people. For a better understanding of trust, the moral and social dimensions of trust need to be studied separately.

The study offers a direction for implementation of relational contracting in project management, project teamwork and strategy implementation. Implications in practice include: project management – time, cost and quality are greatly affected by people implementation and therefore a balance of control and trust is required; project team – trust needs to be cultivated with rules and norms in a multi‐party working team because trust is not self‐generated; and strategy implementation – both interpersonal and inter‐firm trust have to be considered, particularly at the middle management level.

The paper is of value to both practitioners and academics/researchers in the management development of construction projects by providing a different perspective from the human side.

This paper aims to examine the impact of leadership style and team context on structural and psychological empowerment perceptions in project teams.

It was posited that span of control and within team interdependence will positively and significantly influence both structural and psychological empowerment. Person‐orientated leadership style was also expected to positively impact both structural and psychological empowerment while task orientated leadership style was expected to have a negative impact. These hypothesized relationships were examined using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression and hierarchical linear modelling (HLM) with data obtained through a parallel quantitative questionnaire survey of construction client, consultant and contractor organizations in Hong Kong.

No significant relationship was found between span of control and any facet of empowerment while team interdependence had a positive and significant relationship with psychological empowerment but not structural empowerment. Task‐orientated leadership was positively and significantly related to psychological empowerment in the full sample and contractor teams but not in consultant and client teams. Person‐orientated leadership was positively and significantly related to psychological empowerment in the full sample, consultant and client teams but not in contractor teams.

The link between leadership style, team context and three facets of empowerment are examined compared with previous studies often focusing on one facet. Sub‐sample analysis enabled more subtle differences of the impact of leadership style in different context to be revealed, an indication that samples may not be homogeneous.

The purpose of this paper is to examine different categories of building project procurement routes based on organisational, contractual, financial and technical issues.

The paper is based on review of literature and conditions of contracts. The UK construction industry serves as a general frame of reference. The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors survey of Contracts in Use from 1985 to 2004 is used to probe the share and value of contracts along different procurement routes and across different conditions of contracts in the UK. The logic is that the value and the share of contracts will indicate the behaviour of different procurement routes in the UK construction market while the in‐depth analysis of conditions of contracts will show the gaps and relationships between the general definition/categorisation and contractual context (conditions of contracts) of each of the procurement routes.

The preliminary result of the analysis shows that traditional routes remain the main type of procurement route for the construction project industry sector, within which different management and incentivisation systems are applied for greater efficiency. The conditions of contracts in the UK support this assertion by aligning different procurement routes to different conditions of contracts and additionally specifying different forms of agreements, special provisions and incentivisation in order to increase performance, reduce risks and improve compensation methods.

The study can serve as a learning opportunity for construction project stakeholders internationally, and clients in particular, to differentiate between procurement routes, management‐oriented systems, relational contracting and incentivisation.

The research provides an original assessment of construction procurement which can be used as intervening tool in different levels of private and public procurement strategies.

The adoption of computer technology by the construction industry has been driven by the competitive advantages offered by the available technology. The continuing evolution of information technology (IT) in the construction industry has led to widespread e‐mail use for informal project communications but, as yet, only limited use of IT for formal communications. This study aims to address this issue

An industry survey was conducted to assess the improvement towards IT literacy and increased competitiveness through the use of IT in Hong Kong, by comparison with previous surveys in the UK, Australia and Hong Kong.

The research found that the Hong Kong construction industry's IT technical maturity and technical infrastructure are well advanced and remain at about the same level as Australia and the UK. Construction professionals commonly perceived benefits in migration to formal electronic communications.

The perceived obstacles to the industry's adoption of formal IT‐based communications were found to be additional cost and security/confidentiality concerns, but there are underlying obstacles in the industry's structure and lack of incentive (and budget) at project level.

Empowerment is a concept that means different things to different individuals. The factors that engender feelings of empowerment are thus multifarious. The purpose of this paper is to focus on to the factors that empower individuals and teams in projects settings.

Using the critical incident technique (CIT), 122 critical incidents comprising 69 empowering and 53 disempowering experiences of 30 purposively selected construction professionals are elicited and analysed.

Adopting a broad frame of reference on the premise that empowerment of individuals and teams in project settings is associated with drivers and barriers related to: the individual; the team context; the organisation; and the project – mutually exclusive and exhaustive contextual influences within each frame of reference are identified. At the individual‐level, cultural values and factors related to the quality of relationships with leaders and colleagues emerged. At the team‐level, team context and leadership style are the key factors. At the organisation‐level, factors related to structure and culture emerged. At the project‐level, project characteristics, organisation, environment and technology‐related factors impacted the empowerment of individuals and teams.

Practically, the paper provides targets of concrete interventions by leaders and organisations desirous of fostering empowerment in project teams.

This paper adds to previous research in demonstrating the practicality of the CIT in construction specific research and the credibility and trustworthiness checks employed are exemplary of measures researchers using qualitative methodologies can take to assert the credibility of their findings and conclusions.

Subcontractors and suppliers are playing an increasingly important role in project construction – it is not uncommon for as much as 90 per cent of a project to be undertaken by subcontractors. The result of this increased involvement is that main contractors are now concentrating their efforts on managing subcontractors rather than employing direct labour. Outlines an approach to partnering developed by a European conglomerate which is being employed throughout the UK. Commences with an overview of recent studies into the UK construction industry concentrating on partnering, quality and lean production. The second part discusses the context of these points from a quality, general and construction project management perspective. A form of benchmarking is described and the actual partnering approach is detailed. Finally, the paper identifies the main points relating to quality as perceived by the project participants, as well as some of the overall advantages of adopting this approach to partnering.

Cooperation is generally purported to be vital to construction project success. However, there has been, as yet, no empirical work done to quantify explicitly the extent to which cooperation, in relation to other factors, determines construction project success. This study attempts to fill this research gap. This paper details a grounded empirical approach to identify important construction success factors using data from 29 interviews, 398 quantitative response and six follow‐up interviews from construction firms in Hong  Kong. Results show how using the grounded approach enables the tapping of unique determinants of project success previously not identified in the literature and point to a potentially fruitful approach for future research in construction management.

Public‐private partnerships (PPPs) and other innovative procurement mechanisms are frequently used to deliver both an asset and a public service over a protracted period. The value streams to the parties involved can be complex, but generally arise from the satisfactory provision of infrastructure that is fit for purpose throughout its life. This research aims to investigate the effectiveness of the facility management (FM) function in delivering long‐term value to both the client and consortium.

This paper describes a case study of a PPP in Australia that delivered social infrastructure in multiple locations to a state government. Drawing upon multiple perspectives from within the consortium, it utilises inductive principles to identify the influences on value generation through innovation by the FM function.

The ability of an Australian FM contractor to provide value within a PPP context has been shown to reflect some of the attributes described in literature. However, the extent of innovation, especially in the design and construction phases, has been limited by organisational history and capability, and relational and contextual issues.

This research highlights a flaw in the rhetoric relating to PPP delivery, namely the disconnection between the asset delivery and service delivery phases, which stifles the consortium's capacity to innovate and maximise value. It reveals a set of influences that both resonate with the literature and plausibly explain the suboptimal performance of the FM function within an Australian PPP. By using highly iterative analysis leading to within‐case generalisability, it provides a robust basis for wider investigation of the problem.