Managing Project Community in Infrastructure Megaprojects

Developing countries, such as India, look towards massive investments in infrastructure megaprojects to achieve their development goals quickly. However, megaprojects are plagued with failures and inefficiencies often due to the project’s inability to handle external stakeholders such as project community. Project communities are the end users of the project, are most inconvenienced by the project, and they hold significant potential to stop the project by asking a democratically elected government to do so. In this context, we seek to understand how a metro rail megaproject in India manages their project community through visible and invisible strategies using an in-depth case study. The organizational power theories of the dimensions of power theory and the circuit of power theory are used to explain these strategies. The research draws on data from 30 semi-structured interviews with the project team and five years of social media data comprising 640 Tweets. A Grounded theory method is used to find the visible, invisible strategies and their relation between each other. The results show that invisible strategies depend on visible strategies by relying on the adaptations made for the community and the visible strategies depend on the invisible strategies by relying on the changed preferences of the project community. The findings have contributions to theory and practice of managing project community in infrastructure megaprojects

Systems Thinking Using SSM and TRIZ for Stakeholder Engagement in Infrastructure Megaprojects

Infrastructure megaprojects straddle multiple stakeholder boundaries who have an interest in the project and are affected by the project. Multiple papers in the literature stress the need for holistic approaches to stakeholder engagement, as existing approaches only address the concerns of the noisy stakeholders. This research proposes an innovative approach in which Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) is used for understanding stakeholder concerns, complemented by the use of Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) for identifying innovative solutions to address conflicting stakeholder goals. The researchers simulated the stakeholder engagement of the Coimbatore metro rail project, in India, through a workshop setting in a classroom to check the feasibility of this approach for stakeholder engagement. The 15 participants of the workshop were divided into four groups representing different stakeholders of the project. Data was collected through participant observations by the authors and oral feedback from the participants. The results show that while SSM helped to capture the concerns and goals of each stakeholder, TRIZ helped to identify and dissolve conflicts among these goals through innovative solutions. The theoretical, practical and pedagogical contributions are highlighted

Microgrid cost optimization: a case study on Abu Dhabi

This paper presents a microgrid cost optimization study specifically focused on the United Arab Emirates (UAE) based on the Genetic and Ant-Bee Colony algorithms. The main objective of the paper is to identify size and amount of power supply sources in Microgrids that result in minimum cost. Specific parameters pertaining to the UAE were employed within the new objective function and constraints. Two different scenarios were tested, and their results have been discussed. During this study, it was evident that solar-PV systems were the second most cost-effective way to reduce cost of microgrids preceded by micro-turbines

4D visualization to bridge the knowing-doing gap in megaprojects: an Australian case study

The literature on megaprojects are oriented towards ‘knowing’ the problems and ‘knowing’ the solutions, and there is a dearth in literature aimed at explaining strategies adopted in ‘doing’ or implementing that knowledge. Particularly, the literature highlights communication as important as part of the ‘knowing,’ while there is a gap in ‘doing,’ as performance improvements are still not evident. This research aims to explore how this knowing-doing gap in the communication of risk information was addressed by using 4D visualization. This article discusses the vent facility of a megaproject in Australia as a case study to illustrate the innovation. The 4D model developed for the facility helped the project team to visualize the construction of a critical part of the project, discuss the construction methodology, identify the risks in the construction process and persuade the non-technical decision-makers of the project to take appropriate action. The risks identified through the visualization covered safety, program, and interface risks. This study offers insights into the role of visualization in bridging the knowing-doing gap in the construction industry in the context of a megaproject.</jats:p

TIRSPEC : TIFR Near Infrared Spectrometer and Imager

We describe the TIFR Near Infrared Spectrometer and Imager (TIRSPEC) designed and built in collaboration with M/s. Mauna Kea Infrared LLC, Hawaii, USA, now in operation on the side port of the 2-m Himalayan Chandra Telescope (HCT), Hanle (Ladakh), India at an altitude of 4500 meters above mean sea level. The TIRSPEC provides for various modes of operation which include photometry with broad and narrow band filters, spectrometry in single order mode with long slits of 300" length and different widths, with order sorter filters in the Y, J, H and K bands and a grism as the dispersing element as well as a cross dispersed mode to give a coverage of 1.0 to 2.5 microns at a resolving power R of ~1200. The TIRSPEC uses a Teledyne 1024 x 1024 pixel Hawaii-1 PACE array detector with a cutoff wavelength of 2.5 microns and on HCT, provides a field of view of 307" x 307" with a plate scale of 0.3"/pixel. The TIRSPEC was successfully commissioned in June 2013 and the subsequent characterization and astronomical observations are presented here. The TIRSPEC has been made available to the worldwide astronomical community for science observations from May 2014.Comment: 20 pages, 21 figures, 2 tables. Accepted for publication in Journal of Astronomical Instrumentatio