Journal of Construction Engineering and Management

Planning is an essential function of project management. Yet, many small- and medium-sized contractors do a relatively poor job of operational planning. Better prebid plans will reduce costs, shorten schedules, and improve labor productivity. Unfortunately, the published literature offers little guidance for smaller contractors on what constitutes effective planning. Most papers describe planning as a macrolevel process for owners. Most emphasize scope definition for industrial projects. This paper describes a microlevel planning process for contractors. It consists of eight steps which are: (1) assess contract risks; (2) develop a preliminary execution plan; (3) develop site layout plans; (4) identify the sequences that are essential-to-success; (5) develop detailed operational plans; (6) develop proactive strategies to assure construction input into design; (7) revise the preliminary plan; and (8) communicate and enforce the plan. The entire process is illustrated with a case study project and is fully illustrated with figures which show how to integrate the work of multiple contractors, keep key resources (crews or equipment) fully engaged with no downtime, provide time buffers so the work of follow on crews can be efficiently done, expedite the schedule using multiple work stations and concurrent work, ways to communicate the work plan to the superintendent and foremen, and how to assess the feasibility of various work methods. The steps are easy to understand and implement. They will yield immediate positive results.

In recent years, several public authorities have been making advances in developing bidding terms for contracts regulating the management of infrastructure. Up to now these bidding terms have focused on granting the contract to the bidder who, having agreed to comply with the requirement of a specified level of quality, as stipulated in the contract, submits the lowest tender in terms of price. As a result, the experience of implementing quality-related incentives for the management of infrastructure has been scarce. This paper demonstrates that, if infrastructure quality is verifiable and the social benefit derived from it is measurable, there is a better way both to tender and to regulate those contracts, based on a combination of price and quality standards. In addition, the paper proposes a new procurement procedure to encourage bidders to provide better quality levels. The last part of the paper provides a practical example of how to calculate a quality index for contracts regulating the management of infrastructure. The paper ends with a set of conclusions related to the advantages of the new tendering mechanism and its possible application.

Unbalanced bidding describes an activity otherwise known as item price loading. It is a practice used to some extent by building contractors to determine the prices that they will allocate to the individual component items within a project. This practice takes advantage of the contractor’s opportunity to manipulate these prices without this affecting their overall bid price for a project. Three types of loading are described, namely those of “front-end loading,” “back-end loading,” and “quantity error exploitation” (otherwise known as “individual rate loading”). Several scientists have expressed an interest in this field, starting with Marvin Gates in 1959. All of these scientific endeavors have entailed the attempt by which to mathematically determine the optimum method of item pricing. These efforts are seen as potentially significant given that it has become recognized that this practice can contribute substantially to a contractor’s profit as well as their risk. It is therefore interesting to note that although some research has found that some forms of unbalanced bidding are being practiced, there is no published research known to the writers that describes any practical application of any of the mathematical models that have been advocated by the aforementioned scientific community. A critical assessment is made of all of the scientific contributions known to the writers that have been in this field. This critical assessment finds flaws with all of the existing scientific proposals. In particular it finds fault with the technique that is incorporated into many of them by which prices are bounded by arbitrary upper and lower limits that have no scientific basis. It also concludes that further research is required to test the practical efficacy of some of these academic models.

The dynamic nature of today’s construction industry compels construction partners to seek strategies in order to improve performance. Current research introduces a performance evaluation model for construction companies in order to provide a proper tool for a company’s managers, owners, shareholders, and funding agencies to evaluate the performance of construction companies. The model developed helps a company’s management to make the right decisions. Financial, economical, and industrial data are collected from Egyptian construction companies for nine consecutive years (1992–2000). Five indices (models) are developed: company performance score, economy performance score, industry performance score, performance index, and performance grade. The models developed consider companies in four construction sectors: general building, heavy, special trade, and real estate. These models accommodate the effect of macroeconomic and industry related factors and company size on the performance evaluation. The final outcome of current research is a performance grade, which provides the performance of a construction company. The developed model is validated, which shows robust results.

The Singapore government is encouraging construction enterprises to venture abroad for exporting their services and become global players since the local construction pie is shrinking and the global market is growing. The Building and Construction Authority of Singapore has revamped the contractors registration system with the hope of bringing about merger and acquisition of companies for improving the local contractors’ standing in the global construction scene. To diversify into new markets in a new environment, which is very different from local environment, requires diversification vis-à-vis exporting strategy. This study examines the attitudes and views of contractors, operating in Singapore (excluding foreign contractors), on how the strategic move should be focused for diversification vis-à-vis exporting services. The aim of this study is to establish the survival skills necessary for Singapore’s construction small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) to venture abroad. A postal questionnaire survey was conducted and the results show that local construction SMEs who have diversified have reaped the benefits derived from diversification into new markets abroad. The main conclusions are that construction SMEs have to export their services in order to survive and they can enhance their export capabilities by forming a consortium with the help of local government.

Job performance is argued to be substantially influential to project performance. However, existing construction management literature pays less attention to job performance issues, not to mention exploring the relationship between job performance and project performance. This study therefore aims at examining the effects of job performance on project performance. Four categories (task, behavior, management, and self) of job performance dimensions were extracted by means of an exploratory factor analysis. A hypothesized model is developed, which specifies the relationships between the four job performance categories (independent variables) and overall project performance (the dependent variable). The model was tested using path analysis. Results indicate that the task category of job performance (consisting of nine dimensions) is significantly related to final project outcomes. Specifically, for the success of a project, a construction company must consider how to ensure employees are equipped with such attributes as responsibility, quality of work, ability, job knowledge, experience, efficiency, accuracy, judgment, and initiative.

Operations research techniques, especially linear and integer programming, have been suggested for use in project management. Most frequently these techniques are applied to finding critical path(s) in project networks and for compressing activities for an early project completion. The simplest of these models are usually found in introductory operations research/management science textbooks and they often suffer from a common deficiency: when they employ earliest start times (ES) as variables in the model, ES of activities that are not on the critical path may be computed incorrectly. This may lead to inefficient resource reallocation and leveling. Furthermore, activities outside the critical path may be compressed unnecessarily, as will be demonstrated in this paper. We present a zero–one mixed integer programming model to correctly compute earliest and latest start times of all activities and determine the optimal compression schedule. Several extensions to the model are offered to provide different perspectives of the project and enable a project manager to answer “what if” type questions. A small example is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the models.