Ismail Rahmat

Involvement of key design participants in refurbishment design process

Purpose – This paper aims to analyse the relationship between the degrees of involvement of key design participants in the decision‐making process of refurbishment projects on the design performance.Design/methodology/approach – The approach takes the form of a literature review of the published journals and textbooks along with a postal questionnaire with professional architects. In total 234 selected professional architects in Malaysia were involved in a postal questionnaire survey. A total of 82 questionnaires or 36 percent were identified as being fit to be used for the data analysis.Findings – The degree of involvement of key participants are varied at all stages. Greater involvement of key participants is one of the ways to obtain more information on increased integration in the design process. Highest involvement of key design participants was found in the construction stage, which implies that more tasks need to be carried out in refurbishment projects. The involvement of an M&E engineer outside t...

The effects of formalisation on coordination and effectiveness of refurbishment projects

Purpose – The papers aim is to establish the relationships between the formalisation of construction firms on the level of coordination and effectiveness of refurbishment projects.Design/methodology/approach – The approach takes the form of a literature review of published journals and textbooks, a postal questionnaire survey with managing directors, project managers and contract managers. About 94 construction companies were selected for the postal questionnaire survey. In total, 54 (57 percent) of returned questionnaires were considered to be useful for statistical analysis.Findings – Highly formalised construction firms require higher level of coordination than lowly formalised construction firms. In highly formalised construction firms, the participants managing refurbishment projects tend to circumvent formalisation by having more informal interactions, which contradicts the needs of the firms. The effectiveness of highly formalised construction firms is not significantly better than lowly formalise...

Conflict, Complexity, and Uncertainty in Building Refurbishment Projects

Building refurbishments involve improvement, upgrading, renovation, retrofit, and repair of existing buildings. It is an important sector of the construction industry. Building refurbishment projects are characterized by a high level of complexity and uncertainty which often involves factors such as change in design, inadequate and unavailable information which may initiate conflicts. The aim of this paper is to investigate how the factors cause conflicts. A comprehensive literature review was carried out as part of on-going Ph.D. research program. The review reveals that building refurbishment projects are more uncertain than new building projects and that the uncertainties tend to increase conflicts. This paper concludes that knowledge relating to complexity and uncertainty in refurbishment projects and the factors that cause conflict has to be managed systematically to enable successful project implementation.

Review on the study of green design performance for building refurbishment project: Finding the gaps in knowledge

This paper aims to find the gaps in knowledge in the study of green design performance for refurbishment projectsduring design process in the Malaysian construction industry. This includes critical review and analysis of findings by other well known researchers on the need to establish the theoretical frameworks of green design performance in refurbishment project. Literature review found that project characteristics and design team attributes are the variables. The literature review forms the basis for findings the gap in knowledge that is useful for authors to further research in this area of study.The paper concludes with the discussions on how each variables correlate with another variables which eventually formed the theoretical framework and hyphotesis.