Editorial

Citation

McCaffer, R. (2007), "Editorial", Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management, Vol. 14 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/ecam.2007.28614eaa.001

Editorial

Volume 14 Number 5 offers, as usual, an interesting set of papers, this time with some significance – setting out areas in need of research and making contributions.

The paper on “Team communications” sets out the weaknesses surrounding the use of electronic communications tools and describes the issues that are reducing effectiveness. This will become, for a time, an important research topic until the definitive communications strategy evolves.

The paper on building in responses to disaster management comes directly from reports on climate change and is another new field that the research community will respond to.

The review of the performance of public utilities is in direct response to concerns of the global funding agencies, and there are similar issues that can be raised from the global funding agencies work in other fields.

Other papers on the performance of project managers in Malaysia, tackling the management of variations and simulating comparative bidding behaviour in Singapore and Hong Kong, all make valuable contributions to established research fields.

These excellent papers took 15 authors to produce, four papers with two authors, one with three and one with four authors.

As usual the authors are drawn from the international community of The Netherlands, Denmark, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Egypt and the UK.

Two papers were written by authors in different institutions and countries, the paper on “Team communications” coming from The Netherlands and Denmark and the paper on “Project managers’ performance” from Malaysia and Scotland. I always find papers co-authored across institutional and international boundaries of particular interest. The different cultures and experiences always add something extra.

The papers in this issue are briefly introduced below.

Otter and Emmitt take us into an interesting area in “team communications”. The area is the use of communications tools. Do communications tools help or hinder communications? Do the use of different communications tools by different team members add to communications difficulties? Does the rivalry between different communications tools also detract from effective communications? The conclusions from this interesting piece of work are serious: a collective framework for team communications using electronic tools was missing, a lack of understanding of the proper use of tools was in evidence; and training was poor.

These researchers have revealed and mapped out an area of management that is in need of improvement and created a platform for much future work.

Arain and Pheng return us to the subject of “variations” and their management within construction contracts. Variations have been from the very beginning the greatest source of dispute between client and contractor. Lack of clarity by the client initially followed by many changes, poor design detailing leading to changes have always left the contractor to recover the additional costs through the contract provisions. This frequently leads to dissatisfaction on all sides. Arain and Pheng propose a theoretical framework based on six principles for managing variations. Their theoretical framework has two components:

1. 1.

   a knowledge base; and

2. 2.

   a decision support shell.

However, the real value of this development is whether it works in practice, so a follow-up paper based on a real case study implementing the framework would be very welcome. We are in an era now where researchers have to take their work into practice.

Bosher, Dainty, Carrillo and Glass use a UK-wide survey and interviews and a validation exercise involving professionals from construction, insurance, emergency management and national and local government agencies to study how to attain a more resilient built environment in the future. The aim of the researchers is to identify ways in which disaster risk management strategies can be integrated into design-construction-operation of future projects. They took their stimulus from the findings of the Stern Review and the warnings it contained for the future of the built environment as a result of climate change.

The roles of the key construction stakeholder are identified. However, my feeling is that this is the start of research and development in this field and that it will expand quickly as the research community address these serious issues.

Oo, Drew and Lo have given us an excellent simulation study of bidding behaviour involving a group of people from Hong Kong and another group from Singapore. The findings quantify the effect of local marked conditions in addition to the number of bidders.

The obvious drawback is that it is a simulation and this raises issues with regard to the validity and comparability of the results. To their credit the researchers have addressed these in their paper. My personal reservation is the emphasis given to the mark-up decisions, whereas my view is that the “quality” or “accuracy” or “nature” of the cost estimate is a more important factor.

Tan and Nitithamyong argue that the use of “project management consultants” has not been widely accepted in Malaysia because of previous failed experiences in public projects. The researchers set out to investigate the role of project management consultants and the factors that contribute to their effective performance.

The researchers created a list of factors that would determine the success of a project management consultant and used this as a basis for an industry-wide survey in Malaysia. Their results are published as 12 underlying success factors and five important criteria for assessing performance.

The data should be of value for practitioners setting up new projects.

Hassanein and Khalifa assessed the the performance of 234 public and private water and waste water utilities from industrialized and developing countries. The researchers argue that the performance of these utilities is critical in the development of a country’s economy, especially a developing country. They take their motivation from a UNICEF (2001) report characterising many utilities as “High costs, low efficiency and unreliability […] these are the characteristics of many public utilities in developing countries”.

Given the absence of comparative performance assessment this research and the tools it uses makes a valuable contribution to performance assessment.

Ronald McCaffer