Challenges associated with communication medium among project teams on mass housing project delivery in Ghana.

The construction of mass housing has become a very important policy in the government of Ghanas efforts at reducing the countrys housing deficit. Unlike traditional one-off building projects, Mass Housing Projects (MHPs) typically present a plethora of asynchronous and synchronous communication among project team members. The efficiency and effectiveness of these communications can be very critical to the successful delivery of the project within cost and time limits. The uniqueness and overall importance of MHPs also presents project managers with communication management challenges which are a clear departure from those associated with traditional one-off construction projects. In this paper, project team communication challenges associated with MHPs in Ghana are critically explored. This would form the basis for recommending practical measures and avenues to improve quality of project team communication on MHPs. By adopting a survey approach, data was collected via structured questionnaire administered to sixty-three MHP team members across the country and analysed using mean score index. Both synchronous and asynchronous forms of communications were found to be employed by project team members with face-to-face meetings and discussions, telephone calls, e-mails and text messaging being the most frequently used media. Aside the common communication challenges such as timeliness of required information, distortion and overload, this paper also identified difficulties relating to access to information as well as challenges regarding dissemination procedures and protocols as key challenges faced by MHP team members

Welcoming high reliability organising in construction management

To achieve project objectives, construction project managers have to manoeuvre through complex coordination structures. They have to simultaneously deal with limited budgets, tight schedules, demanding stakeholders and a fragmented supply-chain. Despite their extensive coordination efforts, project managers are frequently confronted with unexpected delays that force them to improvise and re-plan. As a consequence, budgets and schedules tend to overrun and project organisations appear out-of-control rather than stable and reliable. To enrich our understanding of these phenomena, we propose using the theoretical lens of High Reliability Organising (HRO). HRO stems from research into high hazard industries, and is relatively new to construction management. It provides five generic guiding principles that help practitioners anticipate and contain unwanted events. Given that the use of HRO beyond high hazard contexts is not universally accepted within the scientific community, we ask whether it is justified to apply the HRO lens to the organisation and coordination of 'mainstream' construction projects. We elaborate on this issue by addressing its main theoretical concepts, its origin and its application beyond the fields of risk and safety. We further explain why reductionist interpretations of HRO concepts unnecessarily limit HRO's research domain. We propose a pragmatic reinterpretation of HRO that provides access to the field of construction management. Finally, we present preliminary results of our study into delays and overruns in inner-city subsurface utility reconstruction projects. Our theoretical and empirical arguments provide a stepping-stone for future HRO research projects in the construction management field

Messages in bottles: the fallacy of transferring knowledge between construction projects

Although learning from projects in construction has gained much importance in research and practice, progress in understanding and improving inter-project learning appears to be slight. We argue that the adoption of a sender/receiver approach limits the learning effectiveness in construction. Drawing upon the notion of learning as social activity embedded in organisational context, we develop the argument that learning from projects takes place within projects rooted in the historical, organisational and cultural context of previous and current projects. We underpin our argument with results from a multiple-case study on learning in construction organisations