Stefan Olander

Stakeholder impact analysis in construction project management

Construction projects attract interest from various stakeholders who express needs and expectations about the project. These are often in conflict with each other and it is unlikely that all of them can be fulfilled. The stakeholder management process involves evaluating the needs and expectations of stakeholders in relation to the main objectives of the project. An important basis for this evaluation is stakeholder analysis. The approach is based upon established theory, knowledge of stakeholder management and empirical data. The analysis consists of a stakeholder impact index to determine the nature and impact of stakeholder influence, the probability of stakeholders exercising their influence and each stakeholders position in relation to the project—are they proponents or opponents? The analysis of the stakeholder impact index can help project managers to formalize a stakeholder management process.

A comparative study of factors affecting the external stakeholder management process

There is a natural tendency for stakeholder groups to try to influence the implementation of construction projects in line with their individual concerns and needs. This presents a challenge for construction project managers in analysing and managing these various concerns and needs in a stakeholder management process falling within the limits of the project. The aim of the research presented here was to show the factors affecting the stakeholder management process positively or negatively from the perspective of project implementation. A comparative study of two railway projects in Sweden was undertaken to analyse these factors. The study showed that the outcome of the stakeholder management process depended mainly upon how well the project managers presented the benefits and negative consequences brought on by the construction project. Techniques and tools exist for this purpose, but must be appropriate, and these are discussed in the context of the two projects. The challenge for project managers is to implement the project in such a way that the effects of negative impacts are minimized and, if possible, the benefits for all stakeholders are maximized. Project managers must communicate and interact with stakeholders so that the perceived benefits and negative impacts are realistically defined.

Links between Successful Innovation Diffusion and Stakeholder Engagement

Stakeholders can positively assist or hinder attempts at innovation. Much depends on the nature of their engagement. The stakeholder engagement process can be complex and unpredictable, more so if no strategic plan is put in place or if no systematic thinking is invested in the innovation. Stakeholder engagement in the innovation process in general and innovation diffusion in particular is examined in the context of construction. From a theoretical perspective, analysis of the effect of stakeholders could be expected to help in refining the innovation process so that it produces decisions and outcomes more likely to lead to successful innovation and diffusion. To cover diverse applications from product development to the drafting and implementation of national standards, 19 innovation projects were studied. Through a statistical analysis of stakeholder involvement, based on a Fishers exact test, it was concluded that a structured process of engagement has to be an integral part of the innovation process. Accordingly, an explicit plan for communication and engagement with identified key stakeholders is necessary ex ante as a condition for successful innovation and diffusion

Managing short-term efficiency and long-term development through industrialized construction

There is a strong need for a productive and innovative infrastructure sector because of its monetary value and importance for the development of a sustainable society. An increased level of industrialization is often proposed as a way to improve efficiency and productivity in construction projects. In prior literature on industrialized construction, there are however neither many studies addressing more long-term aspects of innovation and sustainability nor studies within the infrastructure context. Organizational theory suggests that firms need to be ambidextrous and focus on both long-term exploration of new knowledge and technologies and short-term exploitation of current knowledge and technologies, in order to achieve sustainable development. Therefore, an investigation of how both short-term exploitative performance objectives and long-term explorative development can be addressed when implementing industrialized construction in infrastructure projects was conducted. A case study consisting of four infrastructure projects shows that the main drivers for increased industrialization are of an exploitative nature, focusing on cost savings and increased productivity through more efficient processes. The main barriers to increased industrialization are however related to both explorative and exploitative activities. Hence, by managing the identified barriers and explicitly addressing both exploitation and exploration, industrialized construction can improve both short-term efficiency and long-term innovation and sustainability.

Life Cycle Assessment in the Built Environment

As this book currently stands, it serves as a useful tool book for those who may find themselves involved in construction adjudication in Australia and can be used as teaching material in construction management courses covering the Australian adjudication system. However, its narrow geographical focus will inevitably limit its reader pool, which is a pity for a book so finely structured and lucidly written. I suggest two ways to engage a wider readership: first, set security of payment legislation in the context of international efforts to reform construction; second, discuss the effect of security of payment legislation in general and adjudication in particular on the working of the whole construction industry, perhaps from the perspective of bargaining power distribution.

Stakeholder Participation for Sustainable Property Development

Complexity in property development projects involves and affects stakeholders with different attributes, interests, needs and concerns. Thus, each stakeholder may influence a project negatively or positively. The literature suggests that the concepts of stakeholder, participation, social sustainability and sustainable development are intertwined and together can contribute to social change. To enhance transparency and involvement of a wide range of stakeholders, there is a need for a systematic process of stakeholder collaboration in urban property development projects. This paper describes two internal project meetings of a case study of a property development project with the aim to achieve sustainable development. Collaboration, participation and new forms of organising are needed to achieve sustainable property development. Stakeholder participation can contribute to this by providing forums for a dialogue and interactions in projects. Furthermore, institutionalisation, organisational change and commitment in project organisations are needed to safeguard good participation practice. These could be facilitated through action research-based, collaborative interventions where theory and practice contribute to desired organisational change.

Housing deveopers´ perception of the planning process: a survey of Swedish companies

Purpose – The public activity of controlling land use is exerted through the planning process. The purpose of this paper is to examine how housing developers perceive different aspects of the planning process, and if these perceptions might act as a constraint for the development of new housing projects.Design/methodology/approach – A survey, based on a questionnaire, has been conducted with housing development companies having at least one project initiated during the period 2001‐2004 and with municipal housing companies with responsibility for providing affordable rental housing. The study focused on the assertions contained in the questionnaire, which were measured statistically with a t‐test, to establish if the respondents agreed with the stated assertions. Additional information was achieved from factual and open questions to the respondents of the survey.Findings – The study shows that the housing developers do perceive the planning process as a factor of uncertainty in the development of new housi...

Design Configuration in Industrialized House Building

Although information and communication technologies (ICT) were an important issue for Travel & Tourism (T&T) since the 1960s (i.e. computer reservations systems, global distribution systems; Werthner & Klein, 1999), the difference today is that ICT has become a strategic issue for every business (Buhalis, 2006). The special benefit tourism gains from ICT can be put down to the characteristics of the tourism product, being a service bundle ideally portrayed by electronic media and being jointly delivered by (usually) small-sized enterprises. Indeed, T&T is a highly information intensive sector, and not surprisingly, within the e-Commerce sector T&T represents the largest branch. In 2009, 25.7% (€ 65.2 Bn.) of the EU online sales volume has been generated by the T&T sector, whereat in 2001 this figure stood only at € 5 Bn. (Marcussen, 2009). Moreover, in the US already 59% of the total travel revenue is generated online (NewMedia TrendWatch, 2012). However, although tourism shows high penetration rates with respect to Web-based marketing & distribution, shortcomings become evident with respect to e-business networks (supply-chains) and integrated (internal) process automation (e-procurement, enterprise resource planning, etc.). Finally, most significant adoption gaps are ascertained for ICTs in tourism SMEs to support market research, product development and strategic decision making (eBusiness Watch, 2006). The attractiveness of tourism destinations particularly depends on how communication and information needs of tourism stakeholders can be satisfied through information and communication technology (ICT)-based infrastructures, so that sustainable knowledge sources can emerge (Buhalis, 2006). Although huge amounts of customerbased data are widespread in tourism destinations (e.g. Web-servers store tourists’ Website navigation, data bases save transaction and survey data, respectively), these valuable knowledge sources typically remain unused (Pyo, 2005). However, managerial effectiveness and organisational learning could be significantly enhanced by applying methods of business intelligence (BI; Sambamurthy & Subramani, 2005; Wong et al., 2006; Shaw & Williams, 2009), offering highly reliable, up-to-date and strategically relevant information, such as tourists’ travel motives and service expectations, information needs, channel use and related conversion rates, occupancy trends, quality of service experience and added value per guest segment (Min et al., 2002; Pyo et al., 2002). This makes clear why ICT and methods of BI are playing a crucial role in effectuating a knowledge destination by enhancing large-scale intra and inter-firm knowledge exchange. Indeed, the major challenge of knowledge management for tourism destinations is to make individual knowledge about customers, products, processes, competitors or business partners available and meaningful to others (Back et al., 2007). Wolfram Höpken University of Applied Sciences Ravensburg-Weingarten, GermanyIndustrialized house-building refers to an efficiently managed construction process based in technical platforms, using highly developed off-site manufactured, modularized, technicalfunctional house-building components or modules (Lessing, 2006). Project design in this context is seen as a process of configuration where variable or interchangeable parts of the technical platform are determined (Hvam et al., 2008). Architectural design deals with complex problems that, aside from technical aspects, also concern user functionality and aesthetics. During the traditional design process, architects have a central role in coordinating different requirements concerning use and construction. This is often done in an iterative manner, defining problems and solutions in parallel. This approach is, however, unsuited for the industrialized house-building design process, where platform development is separated from project design. In design practice, the configuration system for a technical platform contains information about the platform’s technical parts and restrictions in design (Olofsson et al., 2004). This means that the configuration system normally does not include information about user functionality and aesthetics, i.e. if the platform can fulfill the client’s expectations concerning spatial use or aesthetics from a comprehensive architectural view. This information is still supposed to be managed independently by the architect, prior to configuration, in what could be considered a traditional early design process. If information about user activities and aesthetics could be included and managed in a transparent way by the configuration system, early design could be fully integrated in an industrialized design process. This chapter presents the results of research with the aim of investigating premises for architectural design as part of an industrialized house-building design process, focusing on three areas of importance: (1) support for architectural design in platform development and modularization; (2) support for architectural design in product configuration; and (3) organization of design information to support architectural design. The implication of the results of this research is a better understanding of how to use technical platforms as a viable business alternative for a broader spectrum of construction projects, including enhanced knowledge of how to manage and overcome the perceived constraints concerning architectural freedom in the design process when using technical platforms.

Life Cycle Assessment in Built Environment

Social scientific practice theory is increasingly being used to examine learning in the context of construction and design activities. Kokkonen and Alin provide a useful next step in this line of inquiry. They have carried out a systematic literature review and analysed the different ways that construction management scholars have used practice theory. They found that existing studies do indeed use practice theory categories established in organization theory and social sciences more broadly. However, their research also shows that the existing studies do not, as a whole, constitute a progressive research programme in the sense that they would consistently provide findings and theories over and above those provided by more traditional learning research. They offer specific avenues for practice-oriented researchers in construction management who may wish to develop a progressive research programme in this kind of research. The importance of cash flow management and optimization can not be over-emphasized for the successful completion of projects. Gajpal and Elazouni introduce an enhanced scheduling heuristic for optimizing cash flow of construction projects in contractors’ portfolios. This provides an effective tool for cash-flow management under conditions of limited as well as relaxed funding. Under conditions of limited funding, it is imperative that projects in portfolios be prioritized for fund allocation. The tool enables schedules to be devised within specified funding limits, while achieving the earliest completion time of based on priorities. The elimination of unnecessary delays minimizes overheads and penalties. Contractors may perform trade-off analyses between completion time and fund-limit values, which helps managers make effective decisions regarding the use of external finance. Under conditions of relaxed funding, it is essential to plan the best utilization of funds in schedules. The tool enables the preparation of project schedules in view of contractors’ overall liquidity to utilize surplus funds from one project to supplement deficits on another. The optimization of fund utilization reduces finance cost and increases the turnover rate of projects. The authors enhanced the performance of the scheduling heuristic by replacing the exhaustive enumeration technique employed in the heuristic to specify activities’ start times within a given period with a polynomial shifting algorithm. The enhanced heuristic was able to simultaneously schedule five projects without having issues with the computation time which proves that the scheduling heuristic can easily be scaled up to handle portfolios of multiple large-size projects. Other potential beneficiaries of the introduced cash flow optimization heuristic include commercial banks and developers. Brunes and Lind observe that cost overruns are very common in infrastructure projects and discuss how cost overruns can be explained. Their study is based on both a conceptual analysis and an on-line questionnaire to project managers. Conceptually, in order to understand why cost overruns occur, it is necessary to begin with a clear and theory-based framework. This avoids simply creating an unstructured list of ‘causes’. The authors present a framework with two distinct steps: a descriptive stage and an explanatory stage. The descriptive stage involves considering when the cost overruns occur (planning stage, procurement stage, construction stage) and which part of the cost function was forecast in a mistaken way. A cost function consists of three components: what to produce, the number of units of the factors of production needed and the price of the factors of production. And, before trying to explain cost overruns, it is necessary to know more detail about which of these components contained the mistake. When this descriptive base has been made there should be four possible general explanations: strategic misrepresentation, psychological bias, lack of competence and simply bad luck. The authors then use this framework for analysing cost overruns in Sweden and the result is that most cost overruns occur in early stages where there are typically scope changes (change in the object to be produced) and changes in the estimation of the amount of factors of production needed (typically related to technical problems). Psychological bias and lack of competence are the explanatory factors that get most support. Bunes and Lind make several policy suggestions based on different assumed explanations. Traditional construction procurement has often been criticized for being a major cause of adversarial relationships between clients and vendors. Therefore, in many countries, partnering arrangements and integrated delivery schemes are increasingly advocated, especially in the case of high risk, complex construction projects. Snippert, Witteveen, Boes and Voordijk examine the barriers to the implementation of a new, ‘best value’ approach; an innovative procurement and