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The purpose of this paper is to focus on the intense research activity with regard to the project inception stage. The need to establish the project parameters and performance requirements is crucial to the success of any construction project. Many organizations have been developing approaches to assist everyone involved in this process. This study aims to provide some data on one approach used by the authors during these early stages.

One approach to these early stages of the project is the use of a workshop‐based technique termed “strategic needs analysis”. Strategic needs analysis assists in these critical inception stages in the development of a project. Six action research studies based on these workshops were organized and analyzed by the authors. This has resulted in the development of a series of decision‐making attributes that capture the key characteristics relevant to the project inception stages.

This paper analyzes and identifies on a two‐dimensional scale the best‐ and worst‐performing of the identified attributes classified by the stakeholders in each study.

The conclusions to this research suggest that working during these early inception stages with briefing workshops is both challenging and difficult.

The findings provide a springboard for pointing out how an ambitious approach like this will always lead to practical implementation problems. It also provides data to indicate where one can begin to try to overcome these deficiencies.

Data analysis and experience on this key stage of a project are now available to inform future researchers and practitioners in this complex but important area of activity.

The pre‐design stage of construction projects has become a focal point in design management research in the last decade, as it is primarily the source of problems such as rework, change orders, and contractual claims. In particular, it is widely acknowledged that client briefing is an intractable problem which many projects encounter. Primarily this is because little attention is given to assessing the needs of the client, stakeholders and those of the design team. With this in mind, this paper presents a soft system approach known as strategic needs analysis (SNA) to assist clients, stakeholders and their design teams in determining their strategic needs for a given project. The rationale for using a SNA approach during the early stages of the project development process and in relation to the strategic environment of the client organization is presented and discussed. The SNA process is described and applied to two case study projects. It is concluded that SNA can improve the strategic decision‐making process of a project, as clients are able to identify their strategic needs and thus improve the effectiveness of the briefing process.

Over the past 10 years, client briefing or facility programming of building projects, has received a great deal of attention from researchers and practitioners. Despite these efforts, tangible improvements to client briefing remain elusive. More testing and evaluation still needs to be carried out before we can judge whether or not any progress has been made. The primary aim of this paper is to present the present authors' experience of testing three potential client briefing techniques in a study conducted within the design studio of a university school of architecture and building. The authors also place the client briefing problem into context by first analysing types of problem, the client briefing problem itself, potential problem‐solving techniques and the three techniques selected for this trial. The current paper presents the results of a survey of student architect opinions about the processes and techniques that were trialed. It was found that more empirical research is needed with these and other techniques in the client briefing environment because no single technique is likely to provide the best solution in every situation. However, whichever technique is adopted, it seems advisable to identify the client's strategic objectives clearly so that the design team can begin its work on a firm foundation. Resistance within the design studio culture towards potential application of analytical techniques is also discussed.

Strategic client briefing is now recognised as an essential component of best practice in facilities management. A number of different briefing approaches have evolved, or are being developed, and this paper presents strategic needs analysis (SNA). It has been applied within six project‐inception studies with real clients, for developing and choosing a strategic direction for the project being considered by all the stakeholders. Moreover, a survey of stakeholders was carried out after each study, in order to find out how well participants thought the workshop performed in terms of six key process characteristics. Such key characteristics were further divided into a total of 41 additionally assessed attributes considered as important within the client‐briefing process. Analysis of such assessments revealed some interesting positive and negative features. Consequently, the SNA approach was refined. Presents the major findings of the work carried out along with some observations about overall processes, and suggestions for further improving strategic client briefing using SNA or similar approaches.

More reverberant today than ever, given the current legal and political climate, artist David Wojnarowicz's victorious lawsuit in 1990 against evangelist Donald Wildmon's American Family Association tangled with still relevant contexts: plight of the NEA, disastrous AIDS pandemic, and continuous church/state involvement in public debate over social values, including individual rights to sexual representation and artistic expression. Yet strangely, the artist remains largely absent from both “culture wars” narratives and the general record. Increasing his visibility and arguing his significance, this essay re-inserts Wojnarowicz into history, his work profoundly challenging what he called “the illusion of the ONE TRIBE NATION.”

In answer to a question in the House of Commons, the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, the Rt. Hon. D. Heathcoat Amory, M.P., referred to the recently published Report of the Panel on Composition and Nutritive Value of Flour.

Describes part of a wider evaluation exercise undertaken to assess the impact of the introduction of a picture‐archiving and communication system (PACS) on the adult intensive care unit (AICU) at the Royal Brompton NHS Trust in London. The objectives of this research were to evaluate the perceptions of PACS of the medical and ancillary staff working within AICU as well as to undertake a preliminary assessment of its impact on the workload of radiographers. Questionnaires, interviews and a process analysis were undertaken. The research findings indicate that the overall perception of staff towards the introduction of the PACS was positive. The impact of the system on the workload of radiographers was significant, reducing the time taken to obtain an image from 90 to 60 minutes. However, lessons to be learned for future PACS implementations include the need to ensure compatibility with existing IT systems, adequate IT support and initiatives to ensure that the benefits of PACS are communicated to the hospital at large.