Construction Management in a Foreign Land - SP-SSA and Cai Lan International Container Terminals, Vietnam

Construction management is difficult enough in the United States. Creating and managing a team to deliver an international project builds upon traditional relationship demands and is often made more difficult by including multiple nationalities, language barriers, and cultural differences. Imagine performing construction management with limited resources on the ground in a developing country. Now, imagine performing construction management while undergoing the worst economic crisis the world has ever seen while the inflation index is growing at an unprecedented 5 percent per month on materials alone. SP-SSA International Terminal (SSIT), located approximately 85 km (53 miles) south of Ho Chi Minh City and Cai Lan International Container Terminal (CICT), located approximately 160 km (100 miles) east of Hanoi in Vietnam, are examples of projects in which all of these elements for construction management were intertwined between the years of 2008 to 2012. This paper will describe the construction management techniques employed, the problems encountered, and the successes that were achieved during the development of each of these modern container facilities, including the following: ≤ Multiple contracts within a single project ≤ Quality controls and the measures required on these large-scale projects ≤ Construction language and how it is interpreted by different cultures within a similar region ≤ Interpretation of schedule, its necessity, and what happens if the contractor does not meet the established target dates