Securing client's objectives throughout construction project life cycles (PDF)

The main motivation for this eBook was issues facing project teams to meet clients' project aspirations at delivery. Organizational decisions to commission a project are typically manifestations of clients' organizational needs and strategic visions, drivers and priorities. Despite procedures to articulate and define these to the project team, there are many forces that adversely influence the project's development. Thus, the ultimate outcome is that clients must utilize the finished product as an asset to receive the economic return. There are, however, cases where the finished product deviates from the client's vision and hence fails to bring optimum benefit. Thus, one of the four explicit objectives set for this eBook is to share research that reviews and develops tools/techniques aiming at capturing and fully understanding clients' needs and requirements, project vision and organizational strategies.Another objective of this eBook is to showcase examples of how the project supply chain could work more collaboratively with a client organization, empowering the client to reconcile visions and be proactively involved in the planning, design and construction stages. There are occasions that some clients are reluctant even to provide a comprehensive (or adequate) project brief to the project team. This makes it more challenging for the supply chain to understand the multidimensional nature of client's organizational objectives. In projects where stakeholders with diverse organizational objectives are clustered around the client from the demand side, the supply chain faces enormous challenges to meet multiple (sometimes conflicting) needs and secure multi layered relationships, while also considering external stakeholders, who have a power to slow down or terminate the project in the worst case.The third objective is to gather evidence of how construction projects could be procured in ways that assist better understanding of the impact of decision making in the design and construction toward the project vision and fulfilment of clients' organizational strategies in the asset management stages. The supply chain may not have the full understanding of the client's enterprise level, scope and priorities, while repercussions from project decisions on clients' organizational strategies can only be appreciated after understanding the complex micro and macro environmental systems in which they operate. Exacerbating this challenge, industry characteristics will typically divert the attention of the supply chain towards other priorities in a project delivery. For example, market competitiveness forces the supply chain to implement unprecedented design and construction solutions and the presence of other constraints (such as fixed deadlines and budgetary constraints) does not provide the project team an adequate opportunity to model the risk of unverified technology and processes along with an established methodology.As the fourth objective, the eBook brings research that focuses on appropriate frameworks, techniques and/or tools for facilitating smooth information transfer between project and asset management teams. The transitional interactions between project development and asset management should occur over the lifecycle of the project and not be limited to the period of handover. In addition to defining organizational information requirements (i.e. data and information required to secure client's organizational objectives), holistic and integrated management of the project is needed to systematically evaluate supply chain's information exchange plans. Standardized procedures are defined in some countries, such as the UK, to assist the construction industry for managing (i.e. verification, sharing, publishing and archiving) such information in a more structured manner. Nevertheless, ad hoc exchange mechanisms are widely practiced and there is a knowledge gap to be filled regarding the mechanics and efficiency of recent developments.