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The built environment is literally and metaphorically concrete but its creation from conception through design and construction involves many levels of abstraction. This spectrum of activities between concrete and abstract is complex and unexplored in construction but it will be shown that a deep understanding of this is required to make successful buildings in a modern age of digitalization. Abstraction is the simplification of an entity with a degree of generalization of purpose and causality but also used to promote the idealization of the entity. When abstractions are believed to be real then there are conditions of hyperreality. This article unpacks the nature of abstraction in the creation of the built environment through three vignettes of practice; considering: drawings, project planning and building modelling. Abstraction has been key to making buildings but is growing in significance because of building information modelling. The themes of loss of meaning, loss of control and loss of perspective are used to show that digitalization involves creating a dangerous illusion of the connection between data and reality thus creating a problematic hyperreality. This can be avoided by stronger thinking, more openness about abstractions and less exaggeration of their performance.

As project teams become more global and culturally diverse, it is important for project managers to understand how various project management practices are implemented in different countries. We us...

In collaboration with an urban public school, teacher candidates at a nearby university created a social–emotional skills project called Knight Brigade. The author discusses the project planning, i...

Alternative photovoltaic (PV) electric power systems are designed for suburban residential complexes in Nigeria’s Southwestern region as succour to erratic grid power supply. The initial project in...

We report from an environmental monitoring project planning for public participation to evaluate low-cost air pollution sensors. With an ethnographic approach, we studied how challenges were expres...

Presently, Large communication energy is required for the entire project planning system in automation industries. This paper suggests the loss of energy efficiency modeling based on the Multiple F...

This article reports on the “2019 Best Practices from World Libraries” Photo Gallery Project initiated by the International Connections Committee (ICC) of the International Relations Round Table (I...

The nature of the mixed-use building’s characteristics should be considered to calculate a proper construction duration for mixed-use buildings in the project planning phase. However, the existing ...

Work-integrated Learning (WIL) can be a vehicle for the development of students’ work-ready skills. This paper presents the views of undergraduate business students and academics about the role and perceived importance of work-ready skills in the business curriculum and the perceived role of WIL activities in enabling the development of work-ready skills. A total of 50 business students and 24 academics from a number of faculties across the university participated. While students and academics both agree that a combination of on and off campus WIL activities are most effective for developing work-ready skills, students and academics hold different views to the importance of work-ready skills in the curriculum and the importance of including specific skills such as project planning. These findings have implications for the development of work-ready skills and embedding both WIL and non-WIL activities in undergraduate courses for business school educators and university policy makers.

In conventional agricultural research for development (AR4D) projects, decisions about rural innovation activities often rest with scientists. In transdisciplinary AR4D projects in Kenya an...

Computer simulation modeling approach has been used for the last decades to address the growing need for estimation, analysis and improvement of project performance indicators. In this research, a ...

Capital projects are critical to the world’s economy. Despite the advancement of prediction techniques, capital projects still suffer from overly optimistic plans, i.e. tight budgets and schedules....

The purpose of this article is to provide a brief review of methods and techniques developed for the most commonly studied decision-making problems in project planning and control over the last dec...

This preconference workshop aimed to teach participants the skills needed to create a technical services culture that is strategic, iterative, and innovative. The presenters drew on their experienc...

Achieving true sustainability in the conceptualization of new building projects requires radical change compared to traditional green-field projects; circular building principles in a circular econ...

Construction is one of the oldest and most established project-based industries, bringing together a diverse collection of professionals for short periods of time. Within the temporary organization of projects, interaction among the participants ensures a smooth transmission of vital information that impacts the process of production planning. While involvement of participants in the planning process increases cohesiveness among them, the Last Planner System® (LPS) identifies detailed specification of the steps to be followed and the constraints to be removed for reliable execution of the project. To accomplish the goal of this study to understand the effect of LPS on the social interactions of the participants, a critical case study method was adopted. In-depth analyses of the interactions among the participants of two projects, one following LPS and another following traditional project planning, have been undertaken to illustrate the role of social interaction in each one of them. Weekly subcon...

In 2009, Skills Tasmania approached the authors to deliver their Lean Action Learning programme in Tasmania. This programme had run successfully in South Australia for some five years. For Tasmania, a requirement was that participants in the programme be eligible for a nationally recognised VET qualification on completion of the programme. This had not been a requirement in South Australia. This Account of Practice outlines how the authors were able to meet requirements without compromising the action learning approach. Qualifications are awarded based on observed performance, mentoring and evidence gathered. The authors describe the processes used for project planning, qualification mapping, mentoring, evidence gathering and assessment.

Project risks come mainly from the future uncertainties, and new product and service development projects possess the most uncertainty and therefore the highest risk. However, if the project team has gained experiences from previous similar projects, the risk to the project drastically declines. In other words, an inverse correlation exists between member experiences and project risk. Therefore, the guiding principle would be to assign an experienced member to execute familiar work for that member. This study aims to establish a mathematical model that uses member experience to minimize project uncertainty. The nonlinear model assigns members with different experiences to the most suitable tasks to minimize project risk, and thus maximize project success rates under constraints of project costs and communication complexities. An experimental case is used to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed model, and results indicated that under cost and communication complexity constraints, project u...

Inherent in project management is the risk that a project fails to meet planned completion deadlines due to delays experienced in individual tasks. As such, certain critical tasks may be candidates for risk management (e.g., the allocation of additional resources such as labor, materials, and equipment) to prevent delays. A common means to identify such critical tasks is with the critical path method (CPM), which identifies a path of tasks in a project network that, when delayed, result in project delays. This work offers a complementary, stochastic approach to CPM that ranks tasks according to their effect on the project completion time distribution, when the distributions of task completion time are delayed. The new hybrid approach is based on the use of a Monte Carlo simulation and a multi-criteria decision analysis technique. Monte Carlo simulation allows for approximating the cumulative distribution function of the total duration of the project, while the multi-criteria decision analysis tech...

This article describes a project undertaken as part of a cross-campus strategic planning effort. The project documented current campus practices and systems in use for collecting, analyzing and reporting key research metrics. The project identified organizational issues around siloed data collection and lack of clarity on data stewards, data stakeholders, and data reporting schedules. The work highlighted to University Administration the need and importance of effective research information management (RIM) and the key role that the University Libraries can play in this area.

Many uncertainties and cost variations occur in the work activities of a project, thereby causing many possibilities of under-estimating or over-estimating for a bid price. A comprehensive study for each process of risk management should be investigated to achieve project objectives. However, a limited number of studies have a comprehensive viewpoint to indicate the benefits of risk management and the effect on project performance for the engineering design stage of engineering–procurement–construction (EPC) projects, especially in the basic design stage. This research was conducted to identify and analyze the risks associated with a Basic Design Engineering (BDE) project for a high value-added petrochemical plant in Taiwan. First, a project risk management work flow was proposed as an effective tool to minimize the project risks and maximize the management capacity of practitioners. Second, the cost effect of project risks was described by conducting a case study for the design process of a high ...

Effective risk management is a vital part of project management. The previous workshops in the construction industry have shown to suffer from the lack of a comprehensive risk management techniques...

In 2014, the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library at the University of Montana–Missoula was awarded a one-year National Leadership planning grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to explore the development of EIRE, the Electronic Irish Research Experience. EIRE was conceived as a digital humanities project to address gaps in the scholarship on the Irish in the United States by bringing private and institutional archival collections together online. Throughout the planning year, the Mansfield Library and its partners refined the scope of EIRE, prioritized certain aspects of the project over others, and grappled with questions of sustainability, accessibility, and resource allocation. This article shares our vision, process, results, and lessons learned.

One-of-a-kind production is project business. In any project, the decision process is of importance for a successful outcome. However, there is a need for a more formal approach to decision-making in projects. We have therefore, developed a model of the decision process. It uses three types of decisions: selection, authorisation and plan decisions. Enterprise models together with the project life cycle form a platform for developing a decision model. The life cycle enables a decision chain, whereas the enterprise models allow decisions at different levels. The horizontal decision chain is linked to physical flow of documents and materials. Vertically, decision-making is hierarchically decomposed into levels of different planning horizons and time periods. © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is the authors' accepted and refereed manuscript to the article. Locked until 25 April 2018 due to copyright restrictions

Front-end planning (FEP) may be a key element in project success because it helps project participants more efficiently mitigate risk and define project objectives in the preplanning phase. However, very little is known about the effect of FEP for industrial project performance under different project delivery systems. To this end, this study investigated the impact of FEP on project performance by focusing on two widely used fast-track delivery methods: design-build (DB) and construction manager at risk (CMR), compared to the benchmarking conventional design-bid-build (DBB). The Spearman’s correlation analysis and Kruskal-Wallis test were performed on a real-world dataset, obtained from the Construction Industry Institute (CII), which comprised 438 industrial projects built between 1990 and 2010 in the US. The correlation analysis results revealed that better FEP resource allocation could help more design packages be completed efficiently and accurately to accelerate the fast-track process. The p...

This paper investigates an issue largely ignored in the transport literature on cost overruns, namely, cost increases in the early project phase, long before the decision to build is made. This is the phase of project planning that is referred to as the front-end phase in the literature. The rationale of the study is that unless cost estimates during the front-end phase are relatively accurate, the wrong projects may be selected for further development. We first argue for why it is important to address cost escalation during the front-end phase of project planning. We then use Norwegian data to demonstrate the magnitude of cost escalations during the front-end phase of projects and in comparison to the implementation phase. We find that even in a sample of projects with relatively small cost overruns as in the case of Norway, there are substantial cost increases before the formal decision to build was made. This raises the issue of whether decisions and priorities taken at the early stages of proj...

Australian cities have observed a “consensus turn” expressed as broad public support of greater accessibility and public transport provision as revealed in metropolitan strategic plans. In contrast large-scale road projects proposed to traverse the inner-city of three major Australian cities reveals an ongoing and deep-seated attachment by some to car-based travel in Australian urban transport planning. Comparative case studies of these three road projects in Melbourne, Sydney and Perth explores the impact that an antagonistic relationship between the state and community has on the culture of transport planning. Through observational insights, policy and media analysis and interviews with community groups, we show that this antagonistic planning culture arises when there is a fracture between metropolitan strategic plan-making and project planning, and when clear channels of communication and deliberation are undermined.

International standards exist for evaluating building or neighborhood sustainability. Nonetheless, they are still not available for large-scale developments. Of special interest to practitioners is how to ensure that sustainability requirements of large-scale projects are well integrated in a master plan. This paper provides design managers of new eco-cities with a framework to integrate sustainability in the pre-project planning phase. A case study of a planned eco-city is investigated to delineate its pre-project planning practices, compare them to the proposed framework, and infer lessons learned. The case study highlights the importance of regular interactions between business planners and master planners to incorporate sustainability requirements at early planning phases.

For monitoring the status of project activities, project costs, and for controlling the project, the Earned Value Management system (EVM) is extensively used by both researchers and practitioners. However, using only EVM methodology to control a project schedule, the project manager will not know accurately when to take the appropriate corrective measures or when to exploit opportunities for the project. We suggest in this work using both EVM methodology and statistical process control (SPC) in order to better control a project schedule progress. Using the software R, a control chart for monitoring the Schedule Performance Index (SPI) individual observations is designed for the application of the study. We present results and conclusions about unusually slow or unusually fast work progress for a construction project, about the link between the schedule progress and the project team stages of development, and about the entry data necessary to design a project control chart for controlling the sched...

Energy demand reduction and flexible demand from dwellings will play a critical role in achieving a low carbon future. There remain many unanswered questions around the interaction of people with their environment and the technical systems that service them and as a result, multidisciplinary research is a principle component of research funding internationally. There is, however, relatively little published work that considers the operational issues in undertaking epistemologically diverse, academic research projects. This paper makes a contribution by quantifying the operational effort involved in data collection on a large multidisciplinary project and connecting the operational issues encountered to knowledge production. The paper finds that cost of the data gathering to be £46,000/home and participants can give upwards of 217 hours of their time per house, engaging with data gathering activities. The rate of knowledge production is found to be approximately 3 publication/FTE over the lifetime of the project and the risk to generating interdisciplinary insights is shown to be dependent on largely unforeseeable operational issues that compound the characteristic differences in the collection of the data utilised by social and technical research communities.

Few research studies investigate the relationship between enterprise knowledge management (KM) and project management (PM). These studies have shown that today’s PM approaches do not sufficiently include the required KM processes to derive the highest value from project investment. This research highlights the potential benefits of implementing an enterprise-wide KM approach to project management. The relationship between the four KM pillars, as defined by Stankosky, and the PM knowledge areas, as defined by the Project Management Institute (PMI), are investigated. A survey questionnaire reveals significant positive relationships between the KM pillars and PM knowledge areas. The significance and the nature of this association support the study’s assertion that the management of projects improves as enterprise-wide KM processes and activities are increasingly used.

The problems with the poor use of project data include: i. lack of visibility and transparency of what is being worked on; ii. differing understanding of purpose across the project team;iii. silo’d and individual work patterns; and iv. ‘watermeloning’, described as the reporting of project status and progress as green or to plan when the project is red, behind plan. Through the successful development and implementation of a Visual Project Status Wall, it was shown how the problems could be addressed by increasing transparency and collaboration in the project team. The Visual Project Status Wall is a low fidelity, flexible, interactive, visual and data rich artefact that can be quickly adapted to the changing needs of a project team. A set of critical success factors were identified that can be applied by practitioners to the use of Visual Project Status Walls on other transformation programmes.

What happens when software project funding is temporarily cut off and then restored at a later date? Although project funding gaps clearly result in software delivery delays, it is difficult to understand the causes and estimate the relative magnitude of the impact. This article uses System Dynamics modeling to examine how gaps in funding affect software development productivity and product delivery delay. Results provide software engineering managers with an improved sense of the negative effect of budget fluctuations. Two key insights for practicing engineering managers include a Ramp Up Tax that slows development and a Gap Tax due to the loss of project-related skill and familiarity when developers are transferred off a project and then return. Model experiments presented allow managers to compare the impact of temporarily stopping a project versus stretching out a project by temporarily reducing the funding level. Both the model and the patterns of results can provide project managers with a s...

A sharp decline in the number of reference queries prompted the library administration at Indiana State University to begin a project to combine the circulation, reference, and IT desks to reduce staffing at a new consolidated service point. All faculty and staff in the reference/instruction and circulation units participated in the project. The new arrangement and subsequent removal of librarians from routine desk duties have expanded instructional opportunities, consistent with the university's goals. Project participants plan further assessments to better determine the impacts of the new service arrangements.

Courses: Multimedia production.Objectives: This single-class activity should enable students to understand the logic of planning a project, analyze the strengths and weaknesses of different media tools in telling a story, and practice critical thinking. It is useful for students planning their final projects. It helps them to practice visualizing and articulating the major components of a final project by utilizing a table called a morphological matrix. Students first refresh their knowledge about strengths and weaknesses of various multimedia tools in telling a story. Then they brainstorm possible reporting angles of a hypothetical project and work in groups to match a story angle with a story form for the ideal presentation. Finally, students report their ideas back to the class, which allows them to discuss the efficiency of the match of content and form for each idea.

This article considers the role of narrative in undertaking and reflecting on a recent literacy project undertaken collaboratively by an Australian secondary school, public library, and university. Connections between the school’s existing Manga Club and the project’s goals are read in light of dominant cultural and pedagogical narratives regarding literacy and learning. The influence of literary narratives on one project participant is considered as a lens for managing expectations and future project planning.

Project portfolio management (PPM), as a way to manage multiple projects, is becoming a key managerial skill needed by most organizations, especially those engaged in multiple projects concurrently. These multiple projects usually have different characteristics and functions, yet most existing project portfolio theories do not provide an efficient planning and monitoring tool at the operational level. This research aims to integrate the two most efficient planning and monitoring tools—namely, earned value analysis and the Gantt chart to develop a new PPM tool named earned value Gantt chart (EV-Gantt) for portfolio planning and monitoring. EV-Gantt was tested through scenario analysis and a pilot run using a portfolio of real cases. Results show that EV-Gantt performed satisfactorily in resource allocation, systematic reporting, and monitoring enhancement. A standard operating procedure was developed to facilitate implementation of the EV-Gantt tool by engineering managers.

Future proofing (FP) as a proactive initiative for Asset Management is an urgent need against uncertainty, particularly in healthcare due to unforeseeable demographic shifts and rapid advances in medical technology. Building Information Modelling (BIM) is another initiative with profound impacts, but a rigorous analysis between them will indicate that a synergy exists. The aim of this study is to develop a classification ontology of the interactions between FP and BIM by considering the perceptions of healthcare construction experts. Interviews with 13 senior managers were conducted adopting the method of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) and an interaction matrix of BIM capabilities for implementing holistic FP objectives has been developed. The outcome is a taxonomy analysis of 30 interactions with supporting empirical evidence which were further measured quantitatively. For benefits realisation in the context of BIM and FP, the industry experts recognise FP as a strategy that supports organisational and building performance. BIM drives towards lifecycle operation information and data maintainability via communicating the FP strategy from a whole-life perspective and ensuring knowledge transfer across all stages. Healthcare Operators and construction experts should be able to benefit from this taxonomy analysis as an aid to planning for FP throughout their BIM processes.

© 2015 Taylor & Francis. This study sought to examine project delivery challenges currently being faced by energy clients and to determine how they could achieve value creation through better alignment of project delivery processes. There are important lessons to be learned from the energy sector on how to deal with the unique operational and project challenges. Four exploratory focus groups were held with twenty senior project management practitioners, to better understand the greatest needs and project management processes in the energy sector. A formal deductive approach was used to examine and evaluate existing and future energy project delivery processes. From the qualitative data, participants recognised the need to introduce science-based project techniques such as system dynamics and project predictive analytics in project management processes. Participants further noted that comprehensive innovative project delivery processes and analytical approaches are required to cope with the increasing scale and complexity of energy capital projects.

Problem: The professional practice of engineering always involves engineering management, but it is difficult to know what specifically to include in the undergraduate curriculum. Approach: The population of New Zealand practising engineers was surveyed to determine the importance they placed on specific professional practice and engineering management competencies. Findings: Results show that communication and project planning were the two most important topics, followed by others as identified. The context in which practitioners use communication skills was found to be primarily with project management, with secondary contexts identified. The necessity for engineers to develop the ability to use multiple soft skills in an integrative manner is strongly supported by the data. Originality: This paper is one of only a few large-scale surveys of practising engineers to have explored the soft skill attributes. It makes a didactic contribution of providing a ranked list of topics which can be used for...

A faculty team of two psychiatric nurse practitioners, an exercise physiologist, a registered dietician and a pharmacist developed the 8-week Recovery-Based Interprofessional Distance Education (RIDE) rotation for graduate students in the four disciplines. Organizing the RIDE rotation around the recovery model ensured an emphasis upon optimal health and quality of life. RIDE faculty engaged in project planning for several months before the RIDE rotation was offered to students. In this paper, we describe details of the 8-week program. Our next step will be to analyze student feedback and de-identified evaluation data from the first student cohort.

This study reviews relevant literature to identify the drawbacks of traditional planning algorithms related to technical rationality. It also evaluates the suitability of construction project strategies, to bring reflective practice into construction project planning by using an archival analysis approach. The archival analysis used qualitative data provided by the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB), UK, for 66 construction projects that are recognised as being successfully delivered. The information was sorted and analysed via NVivo and content analysis, respectively. The findings show that the characteristics of reflective practice are predominant in the problems and strategic solutions mentioned in the CIOB qualitative information. This study emphasises that the two paradigms are not isolated, but associated through three distinct relationships. Recommendations are given for practitioners to use reflective practice, along with technical rationality to strategically solve problems encountered in con...

National University of Ireland, Galway and the Abbey Theatre finalized a partnership to digitize the archive of the Abbey Theatre in 2012. The partnership leverages NUI Galway’s position as a leader in theatre and digital humanities research and home to a range of theatre archives. The result of the project is the creation of a major international resource for teaching and research with Irish drama, literature, and history. The project addresses two particular challenges faced by the physical archive: preservation and access. It allows unprecedented levels of access to the archive which, until now, has been severely restricted due to space constraints and cataloguing backlogs. The archive contains more than a million pages, 500 hours of video and 2500 hours of audio. The material ranges from posters, programs, photographs, minute books to lighting plans, set and costume designs, sound cues, prompt scripts, and audio files. © Martin Bradley and Aisling Keane

The project delivery method has a great impact on project performance and construction quality. The numerous studies on the project performance of the two project delivery methods, design-bid-build...

Despite attention being paid to the development of planning and scheduling theory, it is unclear whether project stakeholders and practitioners have sufficient understanding about how it applies in practice. A study was conducted with the aim of assessing practitioners’ perceptions of planning and scheduling theory and practice on construction projects in Oman. Data were gathered through a questionnaire-based survey and analyzed using the relative importance index. Respondents were asked to consider: (1) the suitability and efficiency of existing planning methods; (2) scheduling development and performance control; and (3) knowledge-based planning and scheduling concepts. The analysis revealed no significant variations among respondents’ perceptions in regard to the above topics. The findings did, however, reveal a number of factors that are of equal importance to the development of project planning and scheduling. The overall findings imply that practicing managers should implement new management...

Agile project management was developed in the information technology industry as a way of increasing efficiency, productivity, and responsiveness to customers. Many projects with highly uncertain scopes, tasks, task precedence relationships, and/or resources are difficult to handle with traditional planning tools. Better planning in such cases does not lead to better outcomes. An agile approach that maximizes productivity and quality within the resource and time constraints can be superior whether or not the project is IT related. This article addresses when a simplified agile project management methodology can be appropriate for small teams both in academia and in industry.

Many organizations turn to project management offices PMOs in order to increase project efficiency, cut costs, and improve success rates in project delivery. However, many PMOs face the challenge of a lack of recognition of their contribution, leading to the need to repeatedly justify their existence. This article provides new insights into the success and failure of PMOs and also provides the rationale and structure for a holistic approach to establishing and sustaining a PMO.

This article presents a model of decision-making processes in project teams. Project teams constitute a specific type of organization appointed to implement a project. Decisions made by project teams result from the methods of project management and best management practices. The authors have undertaken the task of formalizing these processes using the classical method of constructing decision trees. It has been established that this method cannot be fully exploited because the decision-making paths need changing (the decision tree must be dynamically generated after every decision). Therefore, the authors applied a method for collecting experiences, the Set of Experience Knowledge Structure (SOEKS), to support the structure of a decision tree. This method was used to support decision-making processes regarding the selection of methods and technologies of project management and to classify the location decisions resulting from exceeding levels of particulate matter.

System design—a complex multi-dimensional synthesis task—is a key skill for practising mechatronics engineers. Challenging team projects stimulate engineering students into developing this skill and others, including teamwork, communication and project planning. This paper describes a teaching design that combines project-based learning with problem-based learning. The design of the challenge is specifically tuned to give rise to conflicting engineering constraints and common problems encountered in mechatronics. This paper describes how to use the design process to develop a project-problem framework, and provides a case study in which limited energy economy, sensing and control, and disturbances and uncertainty challenges are emphasised.