Carla Lopez del Puerto

Comparative Analysis of Safety Culture Perceptions among HomeSafe Managers and Workers in Residential Construction

AbstractConstruction workers continue to experience high rates of injury and illness compared with many other industries. Growing evidence suggests that safety culture has a direct effect on safety performance. This study investigated measures of safety culture and risk perception among a residential-home-building cohort within the HomeSafe Pilot Program in the Denver metro area of Colorado. Investigators compared group-level responses of management to frontline construction workers. Results indicate that managers appraised the overall safety culture at higher levels compared with the workers. Managers also perceived a higher level of management commitment to safety and health than that reported by workers.

Keys to Success in Megaproject Management in Mexico and the United States: Case Study

AbstractThe transportation industry is continually developing larger complex projects in an effort to keep the traveling public and goods moving. Investigating successful projects enables practitioners to apply and refine successful practices in order to manage future projects more effectively. This paper investigates the Transportation Expansion (T-REX) project in the United States and the Highway Durango Mazatlan project in Mexico to discover practices that supported the success of these two large, complex projects. Both projects have historic significance. T-REX was the first design-build project in the United States that included both major highway and transit elements and the Highway Durango Mazatlan project is the largest construction project to date in Mexico. The Highway Durango Mazatlan project was designated by Mexico’s president as the project to commemorate the bicentennial anniversary of Mexico’s independence. This mega-project was designed and is being built to highlight Mexico’s capability ...

Project Management Strategies for Complex Projects: Case Study Report

Successful management of complex transportation projects requires a fundamental change in how projects are planned, developed, designed, procured, and constructed. The Strategic Highway Research Program 2 (SHRP 2) Renewal Research Project R10, Project Management Strategies for Complex Projects, is investigating strategies, tools, techniques, and methods that can be effectively used for complex project management. This report for Project R10 describes the results of Task 4 (Develop Case Studies) and a portion of Task 5 (Analyze Case Studies). Fifteen projects in the United States and three international projects were investigated through in-depth case studies to identify tools that aid project managers of complex projects to successfully deliver projects. These 18 projects represent a number of different project types, locations, project sizes, and phases of project development. The tools identified from these projects fall into two areas: project development and project execution.

Contractual Approaches to Address Geotechnical Uncertainty in Design-Build Public Transportation Projects

AbstractGeotechnical uncertainty may be the most difficult risk to manage in construction. In design-build (DB), where the project’s price is fixed before design and in many cases the subsurface investigation is complete, the risk profile is fundamentally changed and the owner must address it. This paper assesses the potential of DB as a tool for addressing geotechnical uncertainty in public transportation projects by comparatively evaluating three successful approaches. The first case study involves the use of a geotechnical baseline report as a subsurface condition risk allocation tool. The second uses unit price pay items inside the larger lump sum contract to share the geotechnical risk with the design-builder. Finally, a “nested DB” landslide repair clause inside a design-bid-build interstate highway contract successfully addressed the post-award potential landslide risk. The paper concludes that each of the contractual management approaches provided an effective means for addressing geotechnical unc...

Role of Gender and Industry Experience in Construction Management Student Self-efficacy, Motivation, and Planned Behavior

ABSTRACT The construction management (CM) profession is projected to grow over the next several years and a bachelor’s degree coupled with industry experience produces the best CM employment prospects. Many CM undergraduate programs boast job placement rates of 90% to 100%, suggesting an unmet demand for graduates. Females are the largest untapped source of labor for the construction industry, yet are underrepresented at 6% to 10% of CM professionals and undergraduates. A young adult’s decisions regarding career pathways and college attendance depend on several factors, including one’s sense of self-worth. Self-efficacy and motivation are predictors of students’ educational pursuits, persistence, and performance. This study investigated undergraduate CM students’ (n = 587) construction education domain-level self-efficacy (CESE), motivation (CEM), and planned behavior (CEPB) by gender, as well as level of hands-on and management-based construction experience. Results of the t-test revealed the female CM students had higher CEM than their male counterparts (p = .025). ANOVA indicated student with hands-on and management-based construction experience reported higher level of CESE than those without experience (p = .002 and p = .027, respectively). ANOVA post-hoc analysis, study implication and limitations, as well as opportunities for further research are discussed.

Framework for Objectively Determining Best Practices for Alternative Contracting Methods

Alternative contracting method (ACM) usage has grown to the point where the industry has sufficient experience to provide a definitive set of best practices both to promote consistency in the nation’s procurement system and to leverage the lessons learned by early ACM adopters. The barrier to achieving this goal is that there is no uniform agreement on the definition of what constitutes a best practice. Both an objective definition and a framework for identifying and analyzing ACM practices are proposed that have been found to be effective by peer-reviewed research to determine whether a given practice deserves to be termed as a best practice. The framework is based on a series of indexes that are used to rank candidate practices in order of their importance and their effectiveness. The 24 ACM practices evaluated were identified from six NCHRP Synthesis reports on ACM topics. It was found that only four of the 24 candidates met the objective criteria to be termed a best practice. These candidates were formalizing and institutionalizing agency ACM procedures, using two-step best-value award procedures, appointing an agency ACM champion, and offering stipends for unsuccessful competitors.

Emergency Megaproject Case Study Protest: The Interstate Highway 35 West Bridge

AbstractWhen a disaster destroys a vital piece of infrastructure, such as an interstate highway or a large bridge, the procurement must be developed in a manner that expedites the restoration of se...

Construction engineering management culture shift: Is the lowest tender offer dead?

The procurement of public construction projects must walk a fine line between the corruption of state officials and collusion of contractors. The method of awarding projects to the lowest responsible tenderer was originally implemented to guard against corruption of state officials. However, an investigation of the construction industry in the Canadian province of Quebec showed that lowest-tender-offer procurement gave rise to collusion of companies tendering for the contracts. Alternatively, bestvalue procurement has been used for decades, but here problems arise owing to the necessity of subjective judging of measures other than price to compare bids, giving rise to timeand money-consuming protests. The paper proposes a compelling argument that the construction engineering management (CEM) culture should refocus its efforts on enhancing project cost certainty rather than merely searching for means to design a project in a manner that produces the lowest initial cost, and awards the construction to the lowest tender offer that focuses on cost savings during the project development and delivery process. The difference in the two approaches is subtle but extremely important. To make the transition, the engineering management tools must be advanced to the next level. This means that all project control tools for managing cost, schedule, and technical scope must be transformed from working in the deterministic mode to the stochastic mode, thus making the probability of completing the project within or below its official budget the primary decision criterion. To do so, CEMsmust accept that there is a benefit in paying more for an alternative that increases cost certainty for the entire project. The authors of this paper hope that it will provide the grist for a more general dialog across all industry sectors where engineering management is practiced.

Claves del Éxito en la Gestiön de Megaproyectos en México y los Estados Unidos: Un Estudio de Casos

ResumenLa industria de transportes esta continuamente desarrollando proyectos complejos de mayor envergadura en un esfuerzo por mantener la circulacion tanto de las personas como de los bienes. La investigacion de exitosos proyectos ayuda a los profesionistas a administrar y perfeccionar practicas exitosas con el objeto de gestionar futuros proyectos de manera mas eficiente. Este articulo estudia el proyecto de expansion del transporte de Denver (T-REX) en los Estados Unidos y el proyecto de la Autopista Durango-Mazatlan en Mexico, a fin de descubrir las practicas que sustentaron el exito de estos dos grandes y complejos proyectos. Ambos tienen una importancia historica: el T-REX fue el primer proyecto integrado de diseno y construccion realizado en los Estados Unidos, el cual incluyo una autopista de envergadura y elementos de transito; el proyecto de la Autopista Durango-Mazatlan es el proyecto de construccion mas grande de la historia de Mexico. El proyecto de la Autopista-Mazatlan fue elegido por el p...