Implementing Web-Based Project Management Systems in the United States and Japan

This paper reports on results of research conducted at the University of Washington to investigate the means and methods for overcoming barriers to the implementation of Web-based project management systems (WPMS), and to develop a set of best practices in both the United States and Japanese construction industries. The United States and Japanese economies are high-tech intensive and both cultures have embraced technology. However, a relatively small sector of the construction industry in each country has implemented WPMS. The question posed here is why have these drivers not resulted in the industry’s adoption of this new technology, and further, perhaps there are lessons learned from those who have successfully implemented WPMS. This research seeks to broaden our understanding of implementation barriers that are limiting the use of WPMS tools as well as means and methods of overcoming those barriers based on successful implementation in both countries.     

Construction Site Management Team Working: A Serendipitous Event

Despite the pervasive appeal of team working in the construction industry, the empirical relationship between team effectiveness and task performance continues to be generally overlooked. Recognized team performance appraisal remains one of the last frontiers of performance management. This paper sets out to challenge the conventional discourse of team working and test the hypothesis that construction site management team working and project performance is unrelated. The explanatory case-study research method utilizes a variety of data-gathering techniques. An attitude statement questionnaire evaluates team efficacy. A customized suite of key performance indicators sympathetic to project performance is used to measure project success. Statistical examination of the data demonstrates a marked correlation between the two variables. Although the results authenticate the universally acclaimed wisdom; teams and performance are inextricably linked, secondary analysis expose widespread contradictions between the rhetoric of team working and the action of practice. Obstacles to team working include management indifference towards substantive team building, organizational barriers to communication, and the absence of team rewards. A paradigm of individualism predominates, abetted by organizational structures and cultural subsystems that uphold individual answerability at the expense of collective responsibility.     

Success/Failure Factors and Performance Measures of Web-Based Construction Project Management Systems: Professionals’ Viewpoint

This paper presents the results of an empirical study conducted to refine the writers’ previous findings on potential factors that may influence performance of commercial Web-based project management systems (WPMSs) and potential measures that might be used to assess performance of such systems. Data used in this study were obtained from 39 professionals who had practical experience with WPMSs in construction projects. The results of the study confirm 42 factors that can potentially affect performance of WPMSs and 36 measures that can be used to evaluate such performance. These 42 factors are categorized into four distinct groups: characteristics of the project, the project team, the service provider, and the specific WPMS system used in the project. The 36 measures reflect performance of WPMSs in six different perspectives: strategic, schedule/time, cost, quality, risk, and communication. Findings presented in this paper can be used by researchers as a starting point for future research in the area of WPMS implementation and performance evaluation and may be used by practitioners in the industry as a useful guide to increase the likelihood of a successful WPMS adoption.     

Legal Aspects of Information and Communication Technologies Implementation in the Turkish Construction Industry: Applicability of eLEGAL Framework

With increasing awareness of gains and importance of the strategic use of information and communication technologies (ICTs), the implementation rate of ICTs in the construction sector is increasing. However, these technologies have not been covered by legal and contractual practices. The industry needs to implement application frameworks and legal restructuring of the existing related laws and regulations to use ICT in a legal and contractually valid environment. The EU-funded eLEGAL project, which defined a legal framework for ICT uptake in construction, is selected as a model project to address legal and contractual issues regarding ICT use in the Turkish construction industry. The applicability of this project’s results are discussed by using real cases and defining the barriers, opportunities, methods, and tools to use ICT in a legally admissible manner in the Turkish construction industry.     

Influences on Innovation Benefits during Implementation: Client’s Perspective

This study investigates critical factors that significantly affect the benefits of an innovation to the clients and the project as a whole during implementation from the perspective of construction clients. A survey was conducted in Hong Kong, and data from 35 projects that had adopted innovations were collected via mailed questionnaires from project clients. The questionnaire requested respondents to provide specific data about their projects, the type of innovations adopted, and the enablers and barriers to innovation. We found that innovative solutions were particularly beneficial if they were mainly intended to solve technical difficulties in projects and if they were implemented by forming separate implementation teams and by establishing coordination and monitoring mechanisms at the project level. Moreover, we found that the construction clients’ technical capabilities, provision of special training opportunities, and management interests before and after the innovation was implemented were also factors in attaining innovation benefits.     

Benchmarking the World Wide Web in Student Collaboration

The introduction of new communication technologies such as the World Wide Web is creating unique opportunities for civil engineering educators to develop new classroom collaboration methods, where student teams can interact remotely in a virtual team environment. Whereas traditional project collaboration requires regularly scheduled face-to-face meetings, technologies such as the Web are introducing concepts such as asynchronous collaboration, remote videoconferencing, and centralized information centers. These remote forms of collaboration introduce a unique set of questions and issues into the civil engineering domain such as the efficiency of the technology and the appropriateness of the technology. This paper introduces one approach to examining these issues through the use of benchmarks developed specifically for analyzing remote collaboration within Web-based teams. This paper introduces and summarizes results from the first 4 years of a benchmarking study focusing on Web-based collaboration technologies within the civil engineering classroom.     

Charrettes as a Method for Engaging Industry in Best Practices Research

Gaining innovative and useful research findings concerning construction industry best practices requires an interaction and feedback mechanism between industry respondents and academia. Typical research methods such as surveys, source document reviews, and structured interviews will work, but suffer from barriers which can hamper results. Examples of these barriers include low response rates, asynchronous communication, time commitment of the researchers and respondents, access to project data, and travel costs. Structured workshops (research “charrettes”) are a unique and useful method for facilitating data collection between industry respondents and academic researchers. They combine the best tenets of surveys, interviews, and focus groups in an accelerated time frame. This paper will explain how these workshops provide a critical avenue for industry interaction. Characteristics leading to successful charrettes will be outlined. The paper will conclude by describing the benefits of these workshops to researchers including lessons learned from successful workshops.     

Analysis of Techniques Leading to Radical Reduction in Project Cycle Time

Today’s construction business relies on first-to-market product strategies to gain competitive advantages and increase profit margins. This has created an increased demand for a high performance capital project delivery system that can achieve a dramatic reduction in project cycle time. Very few decision tools and guidelines exist to assist owners in choosing appropriate delivery systems and project strategies to radically reduce the project cycle time from the preplanning stage through start up. The research presented in this paper surveyed the construction owners and architectural/engineering/construction firms to identify projects that have achieved greater than 25% reduction in overall project cycle time when compared to current industry standards. The data collected were analyzed to determine the techniques that facilitate radical reduction in project cycle time. These techniques include, best practices and schedule reduction techniques as well as the various management techniques employed on the projects identified by the Construction Industry Institute (CII). This research also identified the barriers to radical schedule reduction. The research concludes that radical schedule reduction well in excess of 25% can be achieved through the selective employment of management techniques, schedule reduction techniques and CII best practices. Almost every construction manager can utilize this research to improve project performance whether for radical reduction or simply more effective execution.     

Greening Project Management Practices for Sustainable Construction

Environmentally sustainable building construction has experienced significant growth during the past 10 years. The public is becoming more aware of the benefits of green construction as prominent politicians, celebrities, documentarians, and journalists highlight the built environment’s impact on greenhouse gas emissions and natural resource consumption. Other factors, including higher energy prices, increased costs of building materials, and regulatory incentives, are also pushing the green building market to grow and expand. However, barriers to green building continue to exist, including the ability to deliver a green project within acceptable cost constraints. In order for project managers to deliver sustainable construction according to clients’ cost expectations, modifications must be made to traditional project management processes and practices. The objective of this paper is to suggest specific modifications to conventional building practices to optimize the delivery of cost-efficient green building projects. This paper presents an overview of research related to the costs and trends of green building and uses these research findings to make recommendations for greening project management practices for the construction industry. Our research results show that greening project management practices can add significant value to a sustainable construction project while delivering it within acceptable cost constraints. A detailed analysis using matrix present specific adjustments to traditional project management practices, with a premise that a green project improves its chances for financial success if a cross-discipline team is involved at the earliest stages and throughout the project.     

Empirical Study on the Merit of Web-Based 4D Visualization in Collaborative Construction Planning and Scheduling

This paper reports an empirical study that tested the usefulness of Web-based four-dimensional (4D) construction visualization in collaborative construction planning and scheduling. Several recent construction projects have employed 4D visualization to better understand the construction schedule and make proactive decisions to prevent logical errors in the construction sequence. Other groups have shown that construction information management with asynchronous Web-based communication can improve decision making among dispersed industry practitioners. It seems reasonable to anticipate that combining 4D visualization with Web-based information management would facilitate dispersed industry practitioners to make collaborative decisions for construction planning and scheduling. The empirical study presented here reports how experiment participants at separate locations collaboratively detected logical errors in a construction schedule when the 4D visualization model of the schedule was represented on the Web browser. Our results show that teams using 4D models detected logical errors more frequently, faster, with fewer mistakes, and with less team communication, than teams using 2D drawings and bar charts. These findings show industry practitioners empirical evidence that Web-based 4D construction visualization can improve team collaboration on construction planning and scheduling.     

Global Dimension of Robust Project Network Design

Managing the increased complexity, emerging uncertainties, and diversity of cultures on global projects is creating significant challenges for architecture, engineering, and construction firms. In global projects, differences in “institutions”—including language, beliefs, values, group norms, work practices, professional roles, industry organizations, and legal frameworks—among team members from different national backgrounds can lead to misunderstanding and conflicts that cause delays, increase costs, and reduce quality. Previous research has examined risk factors associated with international project execution. However, little research to date has explored whether reconfiguring project networks might mitigate such risks. Project organizational simulation tools have been combined with “robust design” experimental techniques to design robust project networks that can perform reliably in uncertain conditions. This paper extends project network design research to examine whether robust designs for given project networks differ between “domestic” and “global” projects, given differing organizational uncertainties. The results demonstrate that robust project network designs may differ for global project networks. This finding has significant implications for the design of project networks in an industry where firm participation in global project networks is increasing, both domestically and abroad.     

Understanding and Managing Three-Dimensional/ Four-Dimensional Model Implementations at the Project Team Level

This paper introduces an extant, theoretical, social-psychological model that explains the sense-making processes of project managers confronted with a new technology to improve our understanding of project-based innovation processes. The model represents the interlinked processes through which project managers decide to implement new technologies on their projects according to the outcomes of these sense-making processes. The paper validates the model against observations gathered in four case studies of technology implementation on construction projects. Doing so, it assesses the general usefulness of the model to explain the success of technology implementation dynamics in project teams. The paper also derives a number of management suggestions from the model: for example, project managers should focus squarely on the immediate benefits of the technology in improving work processes on the project instead of focusing on long-term strategic firm or industry benefits.     

Implementation Issues In Project Web Sites: A Practioner's Viewpoint

Project Web sites comprise a new and rapidly growing category of software tool in the design and construction industry. There are now dozens of firms selling these tools and hundreds if not thousands of project teams using them. As this product category matures, it is relevant to question what we have learned and look to make improvements in the design and implementation of project Web sites. As a practitioner, the author has closely observed the development and use of the first generation of project web-sites. This paper summarizes his observations about the key issues in implementing these sites on projects. The central thesis is that project Web sites need to be better integrated into the job activities of project team members and that the current "one-size fits all team members" model that most Web sites ascribe to does not maximize the value of this technology.     

Considering Prework on Industrial Projects

Prefabrication, preassembly, modularization, and off-site fabrication, collectively termed as prework have become more viable with recent advances in design and information technologies. These construction methods offer a substantial opportunity to improve project performance when circumstances merit. Successful implementation of these methods on a particular project requires systematic analysis and early decision making based on specific factors of the project. This paper identifies those factors influencing decisions on the use of prework, and current industry practices for evaluating the applicability of prework on industrial projects. It then presents a decision framework to assist industry practitioners with evaluating the applicability of prework on their project, and describes a computerized tool to aid project teams in the decision-making process. The developed framework and tool are useful and effective in the decision-making process, and easy to use, as validated by practitioners in the industry.     

Optimizing Implementation of Value Management Processes for Capital Projects

A variety of innovative management processes are increasingly being introduced into the capital facility projects, thereby causing a great concern about which to implement on a particular project among project stakeholders. It is essential to identify the most effective process because varying circumstances on each project determine the level of suitability. This paper details a new systematic approach to determining the best process from among the 44 value management processes (VMPs) that can proactively achieve the articulated 12 project value objectives (PVOs). Throughout this paper, identifying and quantifying the selection principles (e.g., targeted PVOs, timing of initiation, project characteristics, and relative impact), the detailed research methodology and the findings from industry survey and VMP expert input are also illustrated. A computerized tool, programmed by Visual Basic Application on MS Excel, is described, and its ongoing validation process is also discussed. As a first-ever research, this paper contributes to a growing area of research, not only by providing a comprehensive and structured knowledge on the subject of VMPs, but also by developing a new method to effectively select the most beneficial VMPs. From the industry perspective, the results of this study, specifically the computerized selection tool, facilitate the implementation of the VMPs on the construction industry and maximize the potential benefits to a particular project.     

Model Process for Implementing Maintainability

Most companies lack a formal method to address maintainability during the project delivery process, yet maintenance can seriously affect project costs. To address the opportunities available to companies through the effective inclusion of maintainability concepts, the Construction Industry Institute formed the Maintainability Research Team. Using a combination of recent literature, a questionnaire survey, personal interviews, and case studies with industry professionals, the research team organized maintainability best practices into a model implementation process. Developed from the owner's perspective, the model process has two levels: corporate and project. Milestones, steps, and activities further define each level. The benefit of the model process is that it provides owners with a starting point for implementing maintainability. This paper outlines the proposed model process and describes the potential roles and benefits of maintainability on various types of projects.     

Factors Affecting Construction Project Outcomes: Case Study of Vietnam

Due to the demand for built products from foreign investors and the growing economy, Vietnam’s construction industry experiences strong growth. While some of the construction projects are successfully executed, others faced difficulties. The aim of this study is to examine the factors that lead to successful outcomes in construction projects in Vietnam. Using the case study research design, three successful projects and another three unsuccessful projects were investigated. Data were collected from face-to-face interviews with several project participants in each project and archival data. The results show that major enablers that lead to project success are foreign experts’ involvement in the project, government officials inspecting the project, and very close supervision when new construction techniques are employed. A factor which leads to poor performance is the lack of accurate data on soil, weather, and traffic conditions. The findings may be useful to construction professionals operating in Vietnam to put in place factors that can lead to good project performance. For foreign practitioners entering Vietnam’s market, the study may assist them in focusing on the more important factors to achieve good project outcomes.     

Social Network Model of Construction

Engineering and construction projects are dependent on two fundamental elements: (1) the ability to plan and manage the technical components of the project such as the tasks and resources; and (2) the ability of the project participants to effectively develop into a high performance team. Historically, the industry has focused extensively on optimizing the project management processes associated with the former element. In this focus, organizations have emphasized the ability to develop the optimum plan, allocate resources efficiently, and utilize control functions to ensure that the project stays on schedule and within budget. Although this has been effective, this engineering focus has reached the point of diminishing results. Specifically, the engineering approach to project management has neglected to recognize the importance of the participants to the success of the overall project. Rather, the engineering approach has favored the development of an optimum plan as the path to effective project management. In this paper, the engineering-based approach to project success is reconfigured to reemphasize the need to develop high performing teams by recognizing the importance of the project network. This recognition is formalized in the social network model of construction that integrates classic project management concepts with social science variables to enhance the focus on knowledge sharing as the foundation for achieving high performance teams and project results.     

Cost-Benefit Analysis of Embedded Sensor System for Construction Materials Tracking

Tracking and monitoring the location of materials on a construction job site is an important, yet commonly overlooked aspect of field data acquisition because timely information about the status of materials, equipment, tools, and labor resources are directly related to the successful completion of a project. With the advanced technologies and innovations in the construction industry, it has become technically viable to implement automated tracking for construction materials. Through the development of an embedded sensor system, this paper illustrates the implementation of pilot experiments examining the accuracy of a system’s performance. A cost-benefit analysis is conducted to illustrate labor savings associated with construction materials handling by comparison between manual and sensor-based materials tracking. The presented embedded sensor system can be extended into diverse application areas in tracking and monitoring framework by providing improved method of field data acquisition and information management.