Editorial

Citation

McCaffer, R. (2014), "Editorial", Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management, Vol. 21 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/ECAM-07-2014-0091

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management, Volume 21, Issue 5.

ECAM 21.5 took 18 authors to produce the seven papers. There are eight authors from Australia, three from Hong Kong, two each from the UK and the USA and one each from China, Germany and Singapore.

There is one single authored paper, two papers with two authors, three papers with three authors and one with four authors. Three papers have multi-institutional co-operation with one involving three institutions.

The topics is this edition include: success factors in alliancing contracts, learning approaches of Chinese students, complexity requirements in construction projects, education through collaborative learning, Governments’ role in innovation, feedback in bidding competitions, and optimal sharing in target cost contracts.

The research methods used are: case studies backed by interviews, document analysis and surveys; questionnaires; and mathematical analysis.

The paper that I enjoyed the most was the governments’ role in innovation where the author argues that they should be marketers. The reason for my interest is explained in my commentary below and relates to our UK experience in the East Midlands where we tried to take a proactive approach. The other paper that attracted me was the one on complexity in construction projects again the reason was personal experience. The authors offer a software solution which they are capable of producing.

I am still disappointed that more papers do not follow through to pursuing the implementation of the research results. The era we live in is one that values impact not publication. Researchers now have the responsibility for seeing their research work used in the wider community.

The papers in this edition are as follows.

Jefferies, Brewer, and Gajendran explore project alliance contracting to determine the success factors. The research approach is a case study of a large water treatment plant. The data for the case study were conducted using semi-structured interviews of senior managers from the six partners involved in the project. Team culture focusing on an “open book/no blame” approach is vital to the success of an alliance. Five critical success factors were identified as specifically influencing the success of the case study project: the use of an integrated alliance office, the staging of project and stretch targets, establishing project specific key performance indicators (KPIs), facilitating on-going workshops, and the integration of a web-based management program.

The researchers report an increase use of alliancing in Australia. Their research gives a good insight into how alliancing can succeed. It would be hoped that the researchers develop these insights further perhaps aiming for an operational manual for setting up an alliance contract. That would be a contribution that could have significant impact.

Leung, Dongyu, and Liu argue that Hong Kong students are criticized by employers as being rote learners. There has been much research on construction education and this paper reports on work aimed at understanding the influence of personal value factors on the learning approach of Chinese construction students in Hong Kong. The research method and data collection was a questionnaire survey to four universities in Hong Kong which received 431 returns.

The survey identified six influential values of personal integrity, conservatism, determination, discipline, inter-personal relationships, and achievement. The data also show that students who emphasize the virtues of personal integrity, determination, and a positive attitude toward achievement are better able to handle their interpersonal relationships, which will eventually lead them to engage in deep learning.

The authors recommend that work be undertaken to develop appropriate value systems for inclusion in freshman courses. What is a bit disappointing is that the authors do not say: “we will develop appropriate value systems for inclusion in freshman courses.” It does not seem enough simply to describe the data and recommend a way forward. I think the responsibility is to take responsibility for making the progress needed.

Jallow, Demian, Baldwin, and Anumba address complexity in construction projects focussing on the current approach to managing client requirements. The research method was a case study of a leading international global built asset and engineering consultancy organization conducted over two years. The data collection were semi-participant, interviews, questionnaires, and document analysis.

A major factor in complexity was mechanisms for documentation, storage and access, distribution of requirements information between stakeholders and across lifecycle phases of a project, traceability management, and the provision of effective change management incorporating dependency checking and impact analysis.

The authors promise to develop their proposed framework fully and to develop a software platform to operationalize it and evaluate its industrial applicability with construction projects. This should produce a meaningful tool to take complexity management forward.

Chan and Sher advance the case that traditional teaching methods do not prepare students for employment and argue that collaborative student-centered learning is the solution. The intention in this paper is to present the evidence. A questionnaire survey of 621 students is the source of data for this study.

The findings are that the students agreed that collaborative learning benefitted them in developing generic skills but the degree to which it did varied between programs. The authors also assert that collaborative learning was effective in developing employability skills. As the authors admit the weakness of this study is all we have is the student view. The views of the teachers and the employers are missing. So, as it stands, this is work in progress and to be convincing needs the other two inputs. Nevertheless this presents a good framework as a starting point.

Lim case is that governments usually act as regulators of innovation and not marketers of innovation with construction enterprises being the consumers. To examine government's potential role as a marketer of innovation 97 construction enterprises in Germany were surveyed. The results present a complex picture with no one solution.

The author argues for the government to classify marketing strategies according to company size to stimulate innovation. The key recommendation is for government to intensify inter-firm co-operation and to use national institutions as key promoters. The central theme is that government is more than an enabler and needs to take a more proactive stance.

Well this is a fascinating paper more political than construction. Conventional thinking is that governments cannot pick winners so should not be promoting new products or systems, etc. Also governments that are wedded to the free market will not embrace the role of being marketers.

Why I particularly enjoyed this paper is that back in the days when we had a Labour Government in the UK, we also had regional development agencies. Our local one was the East Midlands Development Agency which set up an Innovation Council and I was a member of that council. Our mission was to promote innovation in the region and one of the target sectors was construction. We discharged these responsibilities by issuing grants to aid development and, more importantly, we employed personnel that would seek out innovation developments and broker deals between parties that would lead to innovation if they worked together. In other words our council was proactive in stimulating innovation. Would it have worked? We will never know. Labour lost the 2010 election and the Conservative lead Coalition Government terminated the development agencies and all work in the regions ceased unless funded by Central Government. The rational was that the agencies were spending money inefficiently but really it was concentrating decisions centrally. So my interest in this paper is that we were trying a marketing approach and it deserved a longer run to test its wisdom. I hope the author can find another trial to test the ideas.

Oo, Ling, and Soo set up an experiment to study the effect of feedback in bidding. The experiment used inexperienced students dealing with full and partial feedback in bidding situations. The authors claiming that the results are statistically significant and showed that bidders with full bidding feedback information are more competitive than those with partial bidding feedback information. The implication of the findings for construction clients is that they should provide as much bidding feedback information as possible so that the bid prices will be competitive.

An interesting approach and worth exploring but I am yet to be convinced that the student-based experimental situation can be translated to the real situation.

Also I note that the students were registered on a cost-estimating course. I would argue that improving estimating would have a greater impact on bidding than any other factor. This was the conclusion that I reached in the 1970s and have not been persuaded away from it since.

Hosseinian and Carmichael set out to determine the optimal sharing of monetary outcomes in target cost contracts. The approach was to solve a constrained maximization problem. Practitioners were engaged in a designed exercise in order to validate the approach and propositions. The analysis shows that at the optimum, the sharing ratio between contractor and owner needs to reduce and the fixed fee needs to increase when the contractor becomes more risk-averse, the level of the cost uncertainty increases, or the effectiveness of the contractor effort decreases.

An interesting theoretical analysis which should interest major clients who use target cost contracts.

Ron McCaffer