Learning Through Successful Digital Opportunities for Effective Competition Preparations:Reflections of students and coaches

Education of the built environment is moving towards more collaborative practices. The intent behind the collaborative approach of teaching is to encourage students to explore the unknowns and unravel the problems themselves, with the professor acting as the facilitator. This paper presents a collaborative pedagogical approach that was adopted to teach students from two geographically distant universities. The occasion used was preparation of student teams for Associated Schools of Construction (ASC) student competitions. The participants began by engaging online in a virtual environment and later moved to face-to-face collaboration solving an interdisciplinary design build problem as part of the student competition. The authors adopted an action research method to enhance the capabilities of the students in understanding and generating constructive behavioral changes. The intention was to empower the students to explore new horizons by ‘clarifying and negotiating’ ideas and concerns. The authors evaluated the usefulness of this pedagogical approach based on direct and indirect measures. The pedagogical approach presented is a part of an ongoing initiative between three universities that have shown positive results based on the teams’ performance in the competition as well as affirmative feedback from the student participants

Collaboration in Construction: Legal and Contractual Issues in ICT Applications

The construction industry is a project-based business bringing together many different organisations to complete a desired goal. The strategic use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has enabled this goal to be completed more effectively. Two issues require addressing, the technology itself and the implementation factors of the technology. Such implementation factors should consider, among other factors, the legal and contractual issues associated with the use of ICT, training requirements and its effects on the organisational culture. To date the legal and contractual issues have not been extensively covered, and it is recognised that the technologies have not been properly covered by any recognised legal and contractual practices. This in turn is threatening to inhibit the growth and prosperity of the use of the technology on construction projects. This paper discusses these legal and contractual issues and describes methods and tools that can be used to enable the growth of technology to be used in a legal and contractually valid environment

Critical Review of Tolerance Management in Construction

The current practice of Tolerance Management (TM) is still very ad hoc and reactive, despite increasing calls for waste reduction and an improved quality of buildings particularly within industrialised construction. This paper aims to identify the root causes of tolerance problems, the reasons why current methods have not been as successful as expected and why the industry still struggles with this issue. Having reviewed and interpreted the existing literature, it is apparent that tolerance problems fall into two categories defined by intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Furthermore, the drawbacks of the existing methods for TM were analysed, and the findings show that none of the existing methods have been considered in a continuous and holistic process and they remain scattered

Using Simulations to Promote Generational Communication Awareness and Empathy in Construction Management Students – A Pilot Study

Today’s work environment, regardless of career, is experiencing an unprecedented number of generations working together. Specific to the construction management industry, in order to effectively manage a team in such a generationally diverse workforce, a construction manager needs to increase their awareness and empathy of the varying modes of communication. Working in teams, 29 undergraduate construction management students completed a quantity take-off estimating project where a series of communication constraints were implemented (simulation) within each team that mirrored the ‘preferred available mode of communication’ of different workplace generations. Likert scale questionnaires were administered throughout the course to collect data to determine if a student’s awareness and empathy of generational communication changed through the simulation experience. The results from the simulation indicate promotion in workplace generational communication awareness and the role of empathy within the construction industry. However, these promotions do not appear to have a statistically significant correlation with each simulation. Furthermore, while students generally favour their own generational ‘preferred available mode of communication,’ they overwhelmingly rate face-to-face communication as the most effective communication style in the construction management industry

A conceptual framework for multi-modal interactive virtual workspaces

Construction projects involve a large number of both direct stakeholders (clients, professional teams, contractors, etc.) and indirect stakeholders (local authorities, residents, workers, etc.). Current methods of communicating building design information can lead to several types of difficulties (e.g. incomplete understanding of the planned construction, functional inefficiencies, inaccurate initial work or clashes between components, etc.). Integrated software solutions based on VR technologies can bring significant value improvement and cost reduction to the Construction Industry. The aim of this paper is to present research being carried out in the frame of the DIVERCITY project (Distributed Virtual Workspace for Enhancing Communication within the Construction Industry - IST project n°13365), funded under the European IST programme (Information Society Technologies). DIVERCITY's goal is to develop a Virtual Workspace that addresses three key building construction phases: (1) Client briefing (with detailed interaction between clients and architects); (2) Design Review (which requires detailed input from multidisciplinary teams - architects, engineers, facility managers, etc.); (3) Construction (aiming to fabricate or refurbish the building).Using a distributed architecture, the DIVERCITY system aims to support and enhance concurrent engineering practices for these three phases allowing teams based in different geographic locations to collaboratively design, test and validate shared virtual projects. The global DIVERCITY project will be presented in terms of objectives and the software architecture will be detailed.149-162Pubblicat

Association of Researchers in Construction Management

Building information modelling (BIM) has been proposed as a technology enabled process for the realisation of the performance ambitions of the construction industry through integrated management of information in virtual 3-D formats. Significant challenges however exist which undermine its implementation within the construction industry. The identification of these challenges is an imperative precondition for successful implementation of BIM given the associated risk. The design phase has particularly been cited as a significant beneficiary of process improvement and efficiency gains expected from the deployment of BIM. Despite the critical role of the design phase to project delivery and consequently BIM usage, few studies have sought to interrogate the challenges faced by designers. A qualitative approach was adopted through semi-structured interviews to solicit perspectives of UK design firms on the implementation challenges being faced. Findings reveal a categorisation of challenges as design-specific, team-orientated, project-related, technology related (BIM specific), industry-wide challenges and cost. This categorisation is used as a basis for identifying critical challenges which include: design process lag and loss of time; lack of understanding by clients regarding requirements for the BIM model; lack of learning feedback from projects on which BIM has been used; and lack of supply chain integration. Variation in the challenges across different maturity levels of firms is also confirmed in this study, particularly in relation to cost of implementation. Awareness of these challenges provides opportunities for identifying effective solutions for their mitigation

Collaborative multidisciplinary learning : quantity surveying students’ perspectives

The construction industry is highly fragmented and is known for its adversarial culture, culminating in poor quality projects not completed on time or within budget. The aim of this study is thus to guide the design of QS programme curricula in order to help students develop the requisite knowledge and skills to work more collaboratively in their multi-disciplinary future workplaces. A qualitative approach was considered appropriate as the authors were concerned with gathering an initial understanding of what students think of multi-disciplinary learning. The data collection method used was a questionnaire which was developed by the Behaviours4Collaboration (B4C) team. Knowledge gaps were still found across all the key areas where a future QS practitioner needs to be collaborative (either as a project contributor or as a project leader) despite the need for change instigated by the multi-disciplinary (BIM) education revolution. The study concludes that universities will need to be selective in teaching, and innovative in reorienting, QS education so that a collaborative BIM education can be effected in stages, increasing in complexity as the students’ technical knowledge grows. This will help students to build the competencies needed to make them future leaders. It will also support programme currency and delivery

A Case Study of a Negotiated Tender within a Small-to-Medium Construction Contractor: Modelling Project Cost Variance

From MDPI via Jisc Publications RouterHistory: accepted 2021-06-13, pub-electronic 2021-06-18Publication status: PublishedThis research explores the failure of competitively tendered projects in the UK construction industry to procure the most suited contractor(s) to conduct the works. Such work may have equal relevance for other developed nations globally. This research seeks to teach clients and their representatives that “lowest price” does not mean “best value”, by presenting a case study of a successfully negotiated tender undertaken by a small-to-medium enterprise (SME) contractor; SME studies are relatively scant in academic literature. By applying the “lessons learnt” principle, this study seeks to improve future practice through the development of a novel alternative procurement option (i.e., negotiation). A mixed philosophical stance combining interpretivism and pragmatism was used—interpretivism to critically review literature in order to form the basis of inductive research to discuss negotiation as a viable procurement route, and pragmatism to analyse perceptions of tendering and procurement. The methods used follow a three-stage waterfall process including: (1) literature review and pilot study; (2) quantitative analysis of case study data; and (3) qualitative data collection via a focus group. Our research underscores the need to advise clients and their representatives of the importance of understanding the scope of works allowed within a tender submission before discounting it based solely on price. In addition, we highlight the failings of competitive tendering, which results in increased costs and project duration once the works commence on site. These findings provide new contemporary insight into procurement and tendering in the construction industry, with emphasis on SME contractors, existing relationships, and open-book negotiation. This research illustrates the adverse effects of early cost estimates produced without first securing a true understanding of project buildability and programming. Our work concludes with a novel insight into an alternative procurement option that involves early SME contractor involvement in an open-book environment, without the need for a third-party cost control

A Case Study of a Negotiated Tender within a Small-to-Medium Construction Contractor: Modelling Project Cost Variance

This research explores the failure of competitively tendered projects in the UK construction industry to procure the most suited contractor(s) to conduct the works. Such work may have equal relevance for other developed nations globally. This research seeks to teach clients and their representatives that “lowest price” does not mean “best value”, by presenting a case study of a successfully negotiated tender undertaken by a small-to-medium enterprise (SME) contractor; SME studies are relatively scant in academic literature. By applying the “lessons learnt” principle, this study seeks to improve future practice through the development of a novel alternative procurement option (i.e., negotiation). A mixed philosophical stance combining interpretivism and pragmatism was used—interpretivism to critically review literature in order to form the basis of inductive research to discuss negotiation as a viable procurement route, and pragmatism to analyse perceptions of tendering and procurement. The methods used follow a three-stage waterfall process including: (1) literature review and pilot study; (2) quantitative analysis of case study data; and (3) qualitative data collection via a focus group. Our research underscores the need to advise clients and their representatives of the importance of understanding the scope of works allowed within a tender submission before discounting it based solely on price. In addition, we highlight the failings of competitive tendering, which results in increased costs and project duration once the works commence on site. These findings provide new contemporary insight into procurement and tendering in the construction industry, with emphasis on SME contractors, existing relationships, and open-book negotiation. This research illustrates the adverse effects of early cost estimates produced without first securing a true understanding of project buildability and programming. Our work concludes with a novel insight into an alternative procurement option that involves early SME contractor involvement in an open-book environment, without the need for a third-party cost control