Sm Badi

Assessing the quality of collaboration towards the achievement of Sustainable Energy Innovation in PFI school projects

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the quality of collaboration towards Sustainable Energy Innovation (SEI) in Private Finance Initiative (PFI) projects. While the capacity of PFI to encourage collaboration towards innovation is largely advocated by its proponents; however, it remains to be supported by empirical evidence. Design/methodology/approach – Adopting the Complex Product System (CoPS) innovation management model, the authors assess the quality of collaboration at the interface between the innovation superstructure of public sector clients and users, and the innovation infrastructure of private sector designers, contractors and operators. Two interactional elements are examined upon which the quality of collaboration is assessed: openness of communication and alignment of objectives. The authors apply the model to four new-built PFI school projects within the context of the UK government Building Schools for the Future Programme. Semi-structured interviews with total of 50 key stak...

Assessing the impact of risk allocation on sustainable energy innovation (SEI): The case of private finance initiative (PFI) school projects

Purpose – The allocation of risk among project participants is an important determinant of innovation success in construction projects. The purpose of this paper is to examine the capacity of risk allocation to encourage the implementation of environmental innovation, particularly sustainable energy innovation (SEI), within the private finance initiative (PFI) project delivery model. Design/methodology/approach – A four-case qualitative research methodology is adopted within the context of the UK government’s building schools for the future programme. Findings – The findings identify that SEIs are encouraged on the innovative projects by the perceived clarity, appropriateness, and manageability of the risks associated with the project’s energy performance on the PFI contract. The main SEIs were largely developed as strategies to manage long-term energy performance risks allocated to private sector actors and safeguard their long-term commitment to the project. However, the findings indicate that excessive...

A social network perspective of building information modelling in Greek construction projects

ABSTRACT Building information modelling (BIM) is a technology promoted by governments as a solution to the problems of inefficient communication and limited collaboration in the construction industry. However, there remains a limited understanding of the changes that BIM introduces to the structure of inter-organizational communication and its impact on project participants’ roles and relationships. In this study, these issues are addressed through a comparative study of two construction projects in Greece: one that utilized BIM, and one that did not. Social network analysis (SNA) was employed as an analytical method to examine the inter-organizational communication networks in relation to two types of information exchange – design development and cost management during the design stages of the two projects. Comparative SNA studies were conducted focusing on network density, tie strength, path length, and actor centrality. The research findings revealed the capacity for BIM to improve inter-organizational communication with the BIM-enabled project, exhibiting a higher density of communication, stronger ties, and shorter path lengths between project participants, indicating timely access to higher quality of information. The findings also identified the high centrality of the ‘BIM manager’ and ‘BIM coordinator’, demonstrating the effectiveness of these two new roles in managing the flow of communication in construction teams.

The effect of leader emotional intelligence on leader–follower chemistry: a study of construction project managers

Extending Nicolini’s notion of project ‘chemistry’, a ‘leader–follower chemistry’ model associated with the quality of dyadic interpersonal communication in construction projects is developed. The focus is on the project manager as leader in an attempt to deepen understanding of the effect of a project manager’s emotional intelligence (EI) on the quality of interpersonal communication with their followers, being other members of the project team. While a project manager’s EI, with its associated emotional competencies, is often seen as critical in achieving good relationships with members of the project team, it remains a largely understudied concept, particularly in construction projects. Primary data collected using a series of analytical surveys and live observations of site-based project meetings was used to examine the relationship between a project manager’s emotional competencies, particularly sensitivity and expressiveness, and leader–follower chemistry. Overall, 68 construction professionals participated in the study. The findings suggest that a project manager’s emotional sensitivity and expressiveness (particularly head gestures) may explain variance in the quality of leader–follower chemistry. Based on the empirical evidence in the context of team communication, a leader–follower chemistry model is introduced, which emphasizes the importance of leaders’ emotional sensitivity and expressiveness in a leader–follower communication dyad. The model may be particularly salient in complex project networks with a large number of prominent actors.

Self-organising Networks in Complex Infrastructure Projects

While significant importance is given to establishing formal organizational and contractual hierarchies, existing project management techniques neglect the management of self-organizing networks in large-infrastructure projects. We offer a case-specific illustration of self-organization using network theory as an investigative lens. The findings have shown that these networks exhibit a high degree of sparseness, short path lengths, and clustering in dense “functional” communities around highly connected actors, thus demonstrating the small-world topology observed in diverse real-world self-organized networks. The study underlines the need for these non-contractual functions and roles to be identified and sponsored, allowing the self-organizing network the space and capacity to evolve.

Towards supply chain maturity in construction

Purpose – Several studies have underlined the potential of supply chain management (SCM) in meeting the formidable challenges associated with fragmentation, adversarial relationships and insufficient customer focus in the delivery of construction projects. However, properly documented examples of successfully implemented SCM initiatives, particularly at the lower tiers of the supply chain, are scarce. The purpose of this paper is to extend the existing debates by adopting an alternative approach focusing specifically on the internal SCM organisation of both main contractor and subcontractor organisations, and their direct inter-relationships. Design/methodology/approach – This study sets out to explore the enablers and barriers to the implementation of SCM at the lower tiers of the construction supply chain, particularly the problematic collaboration between main contractors and subcontractors. SC maturity levels are formulated according to relevant SCM concepts and based on Holti et al.’s (2000) seven pr...

Editorial for the special issue on social networks in construction

For some time, traditional conceptualizations, analyses and design of project organizations have been criticized for being inappropriate to capture the complexity of current construction and engineering projects (Blomquist et al. 2010). These projects are increasingly complex, not only in a technical sense, but even more so in terms of the organizational systems needed to design and execute them. Previous project management models and existing ways of understanding, organizing and managing projects seem to have reached their limit of application, showing diminishing results (Winter et al. 2006, Chinowsky et al. 2008). Accordingly, there have been calls for new models and analytical tools that capture the social dimensions of project organizing, and the essence of the inter-firm relationships that comprise the construction project coalition (Pryke 2012). It is argued that the relationships associated with the dynamic, transient and “time-defined” temporary organization require further research (Burger and Sydow 2014). As a response to this call, recent perspectives within construction project literature have come to focus on the social, relational and “self-organizing” dimensions of projects to capture their technical and social complexities. For example, studies on megaprojects show a need for relying on the ability of self-organizing rather than the traditional project management techniques such as planning, scheduling and risk analysis (Pryke 2012, 2017; Pryke et al. 2017). It is argued that to deliver successful projects, there is a need to focus upon “actors and their behaviors” in projects (Blomquist and Lundin 2010:7) and find out “what project managers do” (Geertz 1973) rather than “what is being done” (Blomquist and Lundin 2010:13). In accordance with such a perspective and combined with the increased attention given to the relationships between project actors, a stream of research has emerged within the construction literature focusing on the understanding of construction and engineering projects as social networks (Zheng et al. 2016). Wasserman and Faust (1994) define a social network as a set of actors connected through clearly defined relations. These relations can be directed, that is, they flow from one actor to the other, in terms of information, trust and affection perhaps, or undirected, for example, sharing an office. Relations can also differ in terms of their strength ranging on a quantifiable continuum from weak to strong ties (Granovetter 1973), and their effect in terms of positive or negative affective content (Labianca 2014). The social network concept provides a framework for testing theories about structured social relationships (Wasserman and Faust 1994). As such, it constitutes an alternative to the assumption of independent social actors, often found in traditional project management theory. The rapid growth of social network theory and the associated social network analysis (SNA) in construction research has mainly been driven by the fledgling conceptualization of a construction project as a temporary network embedded in a permanent network (Dubois and Gadde 2000, 2002), with a limited-time cycle and specific objectives delivered by groups of actors engaging in complex problem-solving processes and interacting through formal and informal relationships (Li et al. 2011, Chowdhury et al. 2011). While some network scholars have been concerned with the network characteristics of the construction industry as such, analysing interdependencies between contractual parties (e.g. Bygballe et al. 2013, Dubois and Gadde 2000, 2002, Håkansson and Ingemansson 2013), social network scholars are more often concerned with overcoming the task versus social structure paradigm. Inspired by Nohria and Eccles (1992), our basic premise for this special issue is that the reasons why the application of (social) network theory and the analysis of network data facilitate an understanding of construction project

Public Sustainable-Energy Requirements and Innovation in UK PFI School Projects

Abstract In a bid to understand the relationship between public sector clients’ sustainable energy requirements and innovation, this paper describes a study examining the requirement development process in four private finance initiative (PFI) school projects. A case study approach was adopted to enable a greater understanding of the public sector clients’ activities at the front end of the design process, particularly focusing on requirement identification and the effect of the requirement on private sector actors’ pursuit of an innovative sustainable design. The findings have shown that incentive effects of the requirements are often weak in PFI projects, particularly in relation to the requirement’s specificity and achievability, the inability of requirements such as BREEAM to promote energy efficiency and the low weighting of environmental sustainability on PFI bid evaluation criteria. Taken together, these results offer insight into public authorities in relation to the necessary conditions for the use of requirements as an effective contractual mechanism to encourage innovation for sustainable energy.