Colin H. Davidson

Determinants of performance in the traditional building process

Even though an estimated 80% of all building projects are procured by some form of the traditional building process, the project to project variations in performance are still subjectively and individually explained. The present paper addresses this particular domain. Using interorganizational conflict among the projects task-organizations as a yardstick, the impact of a number of conflict-inducing organizational variables upon project cost, time and quality is measured and significant determinants of performance at these three levels are identified.

A systems view of temporary housing projects in post‐disaster reconstruction

Natural cataclysms (earthquakes, hurricanes and so forth) become natural disasters when they coincide with vulnerabilities; unfortunately, informal settlements in developing countries are only too often highly vulnerable – a reality amply and unhappily confirmed by available statistics. In this context, reconstruction projects are sandwiched between the short‐term necessity to act promptly and the long‐term requirements of sustainable community development – a situation that is currently reflected in alternative and conflicting paradigms at the policy level. Adopting a case‐study approach, we explore the use of temporary housing within two post‐disaster environments, where the impact of different organizational designs leads to fundamentally different solutions to the short‐term housing problem. Our research adopts a dynamic systems approach, associating strategic organizational team design with the development of tactical technical proposals. Two case studies from Turkey and Colombia show that a coherent approach to the sequential stages of providing immediate shelter, temporary housing and permanent reconstruction is not always obtained. The research results emphasize that the performance of reconstruction projects is directly linked to the design and management of the project team.

Building procurement — Key to improved performance

Professor Colin Davidson of the University of Montreal, as corresponding author and Rashid Mohsini of the School of Architecture and Planning, State University of New York in Buffalo, discuss the key to improved performance in building procurement and describe the investigations into the selection process.

Framing responses to post‐earthquake Haiti

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to add a new dimension to urban resilience by exploring how representations of disasters, reconstruction and human settlements are made, and how, by shaping plans and programs, they ultimately influence resilience.Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on James Scotts notion of “legibility” to ask how different representations simplify complex realities and how they are transformed into plans and programs. The paper first outlines the various broad analytic lens used to examine legibility to portray post‐disaster reconstruction, drawing on international literature and policies. The paper then focuses on post‐earthquake Haiti and analyzes eight reconstruction plans and reviews design proposals submitted for the Building Back Better Communities program to explore how different stakeholders portrayed the disaster, identified the reconstruction challenges and proposed to address human settlements.Findings – Representations of the disaster, the reconstruction challeng...

The challenge of organizational design for manufactured construction

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to address an aspect of the innovation process leading to manufactured construction, which is often ignored, namely the organizational changes that necessarily accompany major innovations such as manufactured construction, calling for systemic organizational design.Design/methodology/approach – The information for the case histories was obtained over a number of years by embedded research, where the researcher played an essential role in the projects described, thus allowing access to unpublished information. This observation‐based information was compared to other cases reported in the literature or about which knowledge was obtained though other means, enabling analytical generalizations to be drawn.Findings – Results confirm the initial expectations. In a context of minimum state intervention, e.g. through mechanisms of market aggregation (in UK and the USA for example), namely where the internal forces of the building sector act upon each participant (including m...

Finding out: a system for providing rapid and reliable answers to questions in the construction sector

The construction sector is notorious for the dichotomy between its intensive use of information in its decision‐making processes and its limited access to, and insufficient use of, the pertinent information that is potentially available, e.g. on the internet. This paper seeks to examine this issue. To solve this problem (the ‘problem of information aboutinformation’), a multidisciplinary team developed an online question‐answering (Q.‐A.)system that uses natural language for the query and the reply. The system provides a direct answer to questions posed by building industry participants, instead of providing a list of references (as is the case with most online information retrieval systems), much as if onewere asking a question of, and receiving a response from, an expert.It has the capabilitiesto process questions in natural language, to find appropriate fragments of answers indifferent web sites and to condense them into a paragraph, also written in natural language. The main features of the system are that it uses domain‐specific knowledge (in the form ofa hierarchical specialized thesaurus complemented by terms of fieldwork parlance),semantic categorization, a database of filtered and indexed web sites, and an online interface that is adapted to different profiles of actors in the construction sector. The testing process shows that the system goes beyond the lists of references and links provided by traditional search engines on the web.The Q.‐A.system already gives 70% of satisfactory answers. The Q.‐A.system can be applied to other business domains apart from information retrieval and decision‐making in the building sector. It is also possible to apply it to the exploitation of in‐house knowledge management database.

Are research results used in practice?: This study, adopting a hands‐on approach, assesses what is actually happening to building research in practice, based on a survey carried out in France

Research represents an investment whose value depends on the application of results in practice. A survey of case‐studies reveals that researchers are not very concerned about disseminating their findings; documentation centres and reference banks find it difficult to use them, and building practitioners do not use them. Some recommendations are proposed.

Procurement: A comparative analysis of construction management and traditional building processes

The authors studied the construction management process in such a way as to be able to compare the results with earlier studies of the traditional process. They found that the construction management process solves some of the problems of the traditional process but creates others, particularly when there is a difference between levels of sophistication of the various participants.

Cause and effect 3-D model for measuring performance in construction acceleration: a decision support system PRELIMINARY STRUCTURE OF DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM TO HELP MANAGERS DECIDE WHETHER AND HOW TO ACCELERATE PROGRESS IN CONSTRUCTION PROJECTS WHEN DELAYS OCCUR

Despite the constant improvements in the management of building projects, the authors express concerns about the difficulties in controlling progress with construction, despite the availability of quantifiable and non‐quantifiable data. They believe that a decision support system would assist managers when confronted by the consequences of arising delays, and by the decision whether and how to accelerate the remaining construction activities. The system has the advantages of providing support when facing an ill‐structured decision about accelerating progress when delays occur; it also helps as a predictive management tool for minimizing or avoiding delays and their consequential claims.

CRAWLING THE CONSTRUCTION WEB-A MACHINE-LEARNING APPROACH WITHOUT NEGATIVE EXAMPLES

Professionals and craftsmen in the construction sector make an intensive use of information in their decision-making processes but only make limited use of the abundant information that is potentially available to them, particularly on the web. Consequently, designs are impoverished, construction is defective, and innovation is delayed. To facilitate convivial access to focused information, we have developed a question-and-answer (Q-A) system (reported elsewhere). To support this system, we have developed an automated crawler that permits the establishment of a bank of relevant pages, adapted to the needs of this particular industry-user community. It is based on the machine-learning framework in which an intelligent decision unit is trained to distinguish between nontopic and informative pages. We show that standard approaches which use both positive and negative classes are sensitive to the noise in the negative class. We propose different techniques for learning without negative examples, since initially one only has limited, positive information labeled by human experts; they are evaluated. Our crawler that uses the positive examples-based learning (PEBL) framework is able to collect construction-oriented pages with high precision and discovery rate. It can also be used to build domain-specific collections of pages in different scientific or professional contexts.