Editorial
Article Type: Editorial From: Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management, Volume 16, Issue 5
Volume 16 Number 5 has two noticeable characteristics: one is the large number of Australian contributions, with nine of the 16 authors that produced the six papers coming from Australia. Two of the other authors are from Canada and five are from the UK. The other characteristic is that this issue contains more on social issues and relationships than our previous issues. One paper deals with customer relationship management in materials suppliers, one deals with developing social capital in collaborative projects, one paper deals with the operation of public-private partnerships in the provision of social infrastructure, and one paper evaluates a procurement strategy for the provision of social care services. Thus, between these four papers, two deal with social relationships and two deal with the provision of social facilities. This issue of ECAM has thus moved a little away from its hardcore traditional areas of cost, time, quality, productivity and profit.
The other two papers are on the use of 4D technology to aid planning and data acquisition to measure progress on site.
There are no single-authored papers in this issue: three papers have two authors, two papers have three authors, and one paper has four authors. Research these days is conducted by teams and the resulting publications are multi-authored. The research methodologies chosen by our researchers in this issue are mainly semi-structured interviews, surveys, grounded theory and some analysis. The use of interviews, I believe, puts researchers in dialogue with practitioners and offers a better prospect of the researcher deriving a better understanding of practitioners’ problems.
The papers in this issue are as follows.
Jefferies and McGeorge review the development of public-private partnerships in social infrastructure projects in Australia. Social infrastructure projects are defined as schools, hospitals and prisons. The source of the data analysed is derived from semi-structured interviews with senior managers from the private-sector stakeholders.
The issues the researchers identify are that social infrastructure projects are of a smaller scale and hence smaller rewards than other projects, and that these rewards may not match operational involvement. Also an issue is the balance of risk, with the private partners seeking to share more risk to gain greater operational involvement. This paper should be followed by one that examines the benefit to the public sector in greater detail. PPP provides funds now for infrastructure that the tax base cannot or will not support at this point in time. It is in effect a deferred mortgage. Whether the total eventual cost is a price worth paying is under serious debate as governments seek to balance the provision of infrastructure and spend, a spend that falls on future generations. This debate comes now after a decade or more of experience of PPP with most governments facing increasing debt burdens. This topic places construction at the very heart of some serious politics; our construction community should play an important role in resolving the dilemma of governments,and not just for its own self-interest. There is a nobler role here.
Dawood and Sikka clearly wish to advance the use of 4D planning in construction. Using a range of research methods such as open-ended questionnaires, surveys and semi-structured interviews and historical site records, the researchers attempt to evaluate the benefit of 4D. They go on to develop a 4D-based performance indicator.
The researchers claim to demonstrate savings in meeting times and an improvement in planning efficiency. The value claimed is the improved visualisation for clients, contractors, planners and sub-contractors in their understanding of design and scheduling issues. Some detailed case studies of the performance indicator in action would be valuable.
Love, Edwards, Standing and Irani engage us with customer relationship management in material suppliers. The researchers used a questionnaire approach and randomly selected targets for their survey. The conclusions are that the rewards for customer relationship management are not being well exploited and that the material suppliers need a strategy to achieve this.
Davis and Walker wish to develop human social relationship capital in a construction project environment. Using grounded theory to support this exploratory study the researchers examine the creation of social capital between parties to a collaborative project.
The outcome is a model that will measure improvement in developing social capital. The model was used to analyse the development of social capital in alliance projects in Australia. The key importance of this work is that alliance or collaborative projects require good relationships between the individuals that make up the participating parties. Easy to state but difficult to create. If this project allows the measuring of improving social capital then it could become a valuable tool underpinning the management of collaborative projects.
El-Omari and Moselhi are interested in automating the data collection on site for fast and accurate measurement of progress. The researchers use a range of hardware and software tools such as barcoding, radio frequency identification,laser distance and ranging, digital images, and a tablet PC as the integrating media. Using these technologies the researchers have developed a system that has, at its heart, a database for organising and storing the data. The database is used to produce the progress reports. This looks like a useful development and would greatly benefit from some case studies demonstrating its value, which ought to lead to the commercialisation and exploitation of the system.
Ibrahim, Price and Dainty explores whether the UK’s Local Improvement Finance Trust (LIFT) actually supports the delivery of facilities for improved primary and social care services. The data sources are semi-structured interviews with senior managers involved in three LIFT schemes. What the research identifies is an evolving system not yet having reached maturity. The paper identifies the good practices that should be exported across all schemes and the poor practices that should be eradicated. A good contribution that should be of value to developers of health care facilities.
Ronald McCaffer
