Impact of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) on construction projects

The changing face of construction projects has resulted in a movement towards the use of technology as a primary means of communication. The consequences of this rise in the use of information and communication technology (ICT) is a loss of interpersonal communication skills. A number of resulting issues within the human – electronic and human – human interfaces are identified in an attempt to define the efficiency of communication in projects. The research shows how ICT effects the social environment of construction project teams and the project outcome. The study seeks to confirm the need for further work in order to develop new forms of communication protocols and behaviour. An initial literature review was undertaken to develop a theoretical review of the impacts of ICT on construction project teams. This review identified a number of issues that were then tested in the field through an observation and two verification interviews. The research confirms the existence of tensions and conflicts in the human – electronic and human - human communication interfaces within the studies environment. It is proposed that the increasing use of ICT occur at the expense of soft system communication. The principal impact of this is a form of ‘human distraction’ which adversely affects the performance of project teams. There is limited theory exploring these issues that suggests the problems identified are not well understood and consequently indicates a gap in knowledge

'Don't get arrested!' Trust, miscommunication, and repression at the 2008 anti-G8 mobilization in Japan

Transnational coordination and communication have become increasingly important themes in scholarship on social movements. The alterglobalization movement is one of the most globally networked movements in recent history. As part of its repertoire, every year thousands of people travel from around the world to protest the G8, the gathering of the world's eight most powerful leaders. When the G8 came to Japan in 2008, local activists decided to organize a mobilization similar to those previously held in Western Europe and North America. The shift from Europe to Japan, however, proved more difficult than anticipated. I explore three factors that together hindered the mobilization: trust, miscommunication, and state repression. Through an analysis of action planning meetings, I explore how interpersonal trust combined with dynamics of individual and collective risk to shape relations of inclusion, exclusion, and hierarchy. I describe the interplay among trust, miscommunication, and repression to show how interpersonal trust undermined the movement's own goal of prefiguring more horizontal political structures and, paradoxically, expanded the impact of state repression by creating an individuation of responsibility that implicated movement actors themselves in narrowing the forms of protest available

Overcoming cultural barriers to being agile in distributed teams

Context: Agile methods in offshored projects have become increasingly popular. Yet, many companies have found that the use of agile methods in coordination with companies located outside the regions of early agile adopters remains challenging. India has received particular attention as the leading destination of offshoring contracts due to significant cultural differences between sides of such contracts. Alarming differences are primarily rooted in the hierarchical business culture of Indian organizations and related command-and-control management behavior styles. Objective: In this study, we attempt to understand whether cultural barriers persist in distributed projects in which Indian engineers work with a more empowering Swedish management, and if so, how to overcome them. The present work is an invited extension of a conference paper. Method: We performed a multiple-case study in a mature agile company located in Sweden and a more hierarchical Indian vendor. We collected data from five group interviews with a total of 34 participants and five workshops with 96 participants in five distributed DevOps teams, including 36 Indian members, whose preferred behavior in different situations we surveyed. Results: We identified twelve cultural barriers, six of which were classified as impediments to agile software development practices, and report on the manifestation of these barriers in five DevOps teams. Finally, we put forward recommendations to overcome the identified barriers and emphasize the importance of cultural training, especially when onboarding new team members. Conclusions: Our findings confirm previously reported behaviors rooted in cultural differences that impede the adoption of agile approaches in offshore collaborations, and identify new barriers not previously reported. In contrast to the existing opinion that cultural characteristics are rigid and unchanging, we found that some barriers present at the beginning of the studied collaboration disappeared over time. Many offshore members reported behaving similarly to their onshore colleagues.acceptedVersio

Impact Of Intranets On Employee Perception And Behavior: A Case Study In A UK Bank

This paper deals with the question of how intranets impact on employee perception and behavior. The study uses a five year longitudinal study following the evolution of an intranet in a UK bank to analyze how it changed the relationships between employees and between managers and employees. The discussion integrates two different research domains, the intranet literature and the organizational trust literature. Qualitative data is presented to show the impact of intranets on communication, sharing of information, collaboration, organizational bonding, feeling of empowerment, power distance and sense of closeness. The discussion uses three metaphors to convey the key findings: The Plumbing System, the Iconic Building and the Soap Opera. The main contribution of this paper is in using constructs from the organizational trust literature to better understand how intranets impact on employee perception and behavior

Cultural influences and the mediating role of socio-cultural integration processes on the performance of cross-border mergers and acquisitions

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.This paper reports findings from a longitudinal case study (2005–2011) of a merger between an Austrian and a German energy provider. I develop a model of socio-cultural integration processes based on an analysis of critical incidents expressed in 71 problem-centred interviews and observations with acquired and acquiring employees at four different points of time: immediately before the takeover and during the first negotiation talks, and one, three and six years after the takeover. The findings suggest that the relationship between national and organizational cultural differences and M&A outcomes is mediated by socio-cultural integration processes defined in terms of the formation of interpersonal relationships, trust and shared identity. Based on these findings I formulate specific propositions and build an evidence-based model of M&A socio-cultural integration processes that guides future research and practice

Raising Awareness In Distributed Agile Development - A Case Study Perspective

Raising and maintaining awareness in distributed agile cross-cultural teams is a challenging process, especially as the tenets of agile methods rely heavily on physical proximity, face-to-face communication, coordination and close collaboration. This paper reports on preliminary findings on how a distributed agile team within the financial sector, engages in raising awareness to carry out collaborative activities to accomplish project tasks. We have adapted the use of 3C Collaboration model as an evaluative mechanism to examine how the different dimensions (communication, coordination and cooperation) of the model stimulate awareness within a distributed agile team. The insights gained from the case study, suggest there is a constant interplay between the offshore and onshore teams to try and raise and maintain awareness in order to achieve project goal

Leadership, Trust, and Effectivemess in Virtual Teams

Many organizations are using virtual teams to meet the increasing time and quality expectations of contemporary marketplaces. While virtual teams present advantages for cost control, access to expertise, and serving markets, they also engender practical challenges as a result of the geographic and temporal distribution of members. Previous research has suggested several factors that are critical for the functioning of virtual teams. We build upon this research with an exploration of the relationships between team leader personality, team member trust, and perceived team effectiveness in virtual teamwork. Participants in the study included 873 virtual team members within a combined government and commercial engineering environment. Our findings suggest that multiple facets of a team leader’s personality have a significant impact on team effectiveness, but this effect is largely mediated through team trust. Implications for organizational managers, virtual team leaders, and the research community are discussed

Self-Organising Networks in Complex Infrastructure Projects: The Case of London Bank Station Capacity Upgrade Project

Managing large infrastructure projects remains a thorny issue in theory and practice. This is mainly due to their increasingly interconnected, interdependent, multilateral, nonlinear, unpredictable, uncontrollable, and rapidly changing nature. This study is an attempt to demystify the key issues to the management of large construction projects, arguing that these projects are delivered through networks that evolve in ways that we do not sufficiently understand as yet. The theoretical framework of this study is grounded in Complexity Theory; a theory resulted in a paradigm shift when it was first introduced to project management post-2000 but is yet to be unpacked in its full potential. The original contribution of the study is predicated on perceiving large construction projects as evolving complex systems that involves a high degree of self‐organisation. This is a process that transitions contractually static prescribed roles to dynamic network roles, comprising individuals exchanging information. Furthermore, by placing great emphasis upon informal communications, this study demonstrates how self-organising networks can be married with Complexity Theory. This approach has the potential to make bedfellows around the concept of managing networks within a context of managing projects; a concept that is not always recognised, especially in project management. With the help of social network analysis, two snapshots from Bank Station Capacity Upgrade Project Network were analysed as a case study. Findings suggest that relationships and hence network structures in large construction projects exhibit small-world topology, underlined by a high degree of sparseness and clustering. These are distinct structural properties of self-organising networks. Evidence challenges the theorisation about self-organisation which largely assumes positive outcomes and suggests that self-organising could open up opportunities yet also create constraints. This helps to provide further insights into complexity and the treatment of uncertainty in large projects. The study concludes with detailed recommendations for research and practice

The Art of Research: A Divergent/Convergent Framework and Opportunities for Science-Based Approaches

Applying science to the current art of producing engineering and research knowledge has proven difficult, in large part because of its seeming complexity. We posit that the microscopic processes underlying research are not so complex, but instead are iterative and interacting cycles of divergent (generation of ideas) and convergent (testing and selecting of ideas) thinking processes. This reductionist framework coherently organizes a wide range of previously disparate microscopic mechanisms which inhibit these processes. We give examples of such inhibitory mechanisms and discuss how deeper scientific understanding of these mechanisms might lead to dis-inhibitory interventions for individuals, networks and institutional levels