Editorial

Citation

McCaffer, R. (2005), "Editorial", Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management, Vol. 12 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ecam.2005.28612aaa.001

Editorial

Volume 12 No. 1 sees a new year and ECAM reaching its twelfth year. However the pattern of ECAM remains international authors and wide ranging management issues. This edition has six papers produced by 11 authors. Two papers have single authors, three have two authors and one paper has three authors. One paper is from two institutions. Three authors are from Singapore, three from Australia, one from the US, and four from the UK. The topics range from developing briefs, implementing information communication technology (ICT), examining architects performance, predicting building quality, predicting costs and predicting the psychological well-being of construction mangers. The papers in this issue are the following.

Ling uses the construction quality assessment system to compare design-bid-build and design-build by collecting quality scores for completed buildings. The paper gives insight into the effect of procurement on the quality of the building produced.

Peansupap and Walker explore how information communication technology is adopted and diffused by conducting case studies in three Australian construction companies. The authors identify 11 factors that influence ICT diffusion, the four main factors being “management”, “individual”, “technology” and “work environment”. The findings from these case studies are reported.

Having started my academic work in bidding strategies, concluding that estimates were too variable to make bidding theories work, and moved onto improving estimating I always get excited when I find a paper on bidding, so Williams’ paper examining bidding ratios to predict highway project costs is of special interest. Williams examined patterns in bidding ratios relating to second lowest, mean and maximum bid. The conclusions are that the best performance prediction model was based on lowest bids as input, the bidding ratios did not produce the best predictions. My suspicion remains that what is disturbing the analysis is the variability in the cost estimate. If Bid=Cost Estimate+Mark Up and cost estimate is many times larger than “mark up” and highly variable then the analysis to improve prediction needs to concentrate on the estimate.

Oyedele and Tham report on a survey of Nigerian architects from both the public and private sector. The conclusions are that overall architects need to improve their performance in 82 per cent of the criteria examined, that the public sector architects performed better, that the private sector architects were more concerned with costs and the public sector architects with buildability.

Othman, Hassan and Pasquire return us to the recurrent issue of brief development. The authors present results from 261 survey questionnaires and 47 structured interviews and a brainstorming session. They identified the different techniques adopted to manage on-going brief development and argue that they have an approach to identify deficiencies in practice and how they can be overcome.

Love and Edwards are concerned with the psychological well-being of construction managers. They use the “job strain model” and apply it to a sample of construction project managers and use the results to predict the managers’ psychological well-being. The importance of social support and non-work related support is identified as significant.

Ron McCaffer