The project lifecycle

2021 ◽  
pp. 14-35
Author(s):  
Christopher Lennon
Keyword(s):  
2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaakko Kujala ◽  
Soili Nystén-Haarala ◽  
Jouko Nuottila

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to increase the understanding of the main challenges of the contracting process and project contracts in the context of project business characterized by a high level of complexity and uncertainty. The authors argue that understanding contracting as a flexible process and as a business tool will contribute to creating more value in projects which are implemented in constantly changing circumstances or which require gradual and iterative development. Design/methodology/approach – This is a conceptual paper with illustrative examples from the software industry. Findings – A prevailing approach for both managing contracts and the contracting process focuses on careful planning and drafting of contracts that protect each party in the case of conflicts and disagreements. The underlying assumption is that all activities can be planned and documented in a formal contract. According to this approach, the contracting process is seen only as a bargaining negotiation and the project contract as a detailed agreement of the responsibilities and safeguarding clauses to protect one’s position in the event of conflicts and failures. However, in the context of project business characterized by complexity and uncertainty, there is a need for flexible project contracts. The authors suggest that there are two fundamentally different approaches to implementing flexibility in both the contracting process and the project contract: postponing the decision until there is adequate information for decision making or making decisions that allow flexible adaptation to changes during the project lifecycle. Practical implications – The authors suggest that organizations in project business should pay closer attention to how contracts are formed and how flexibility is introduced to projects. Organizations are encouraged to see contracts as a business tool, not as rigid documents which are taken into use in case something goes wrong. Originality/value – This paper contributes to the understanding of how to adapt the contracting process to overcome challenges related to uncertainty, especially during the early phases of the project lifecycle. The authors provide a novel perspective on contracting as a process that extends over the lifecycle of a project and on the project contract as an agreement between parties formed during the contracting process. This perspective includes formal contract documents as well as various other documents, oral communication, commitments, actions and incidents.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jemima Yarnold ◽  
Saeed Banihashemi ◽  
Charles Lemckert ◽  
Hamed Golizadeh

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to examine, review and analyse the current literature on building and construction quality and determine the related themes and gaps.Design/methodology/approachA systematic review approach was adopted on the building quality literature, and keywords such as “construction” or “building”; “defect” and “quality” or “rework” were searched through the Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar databases. A number of articles were found and filtered by title, abstract and keyword relevancy. Further articles were cross-referenced from these and again filtered by title, abstract and keyword relevancy. The time period for the search was 2000–2020. A total of 97 articles were found and analysed on the topic.FindingsA number of recurring themes were found throughout the literature. They are safety, occupier satisfaction, cost, time, licensing, culture, training, software and building quality frameworks, classifications and recommendations. These themes were linked to display relationships between them from the literature. Based on the project lifecycle stages, an amalgamated classification system was developed and is presented here. The gaps in the current literature have been analysed and reported on.Originality/valueA comprehensive descriptive, thematic and gap analysis was conducted on the available literature of building and construction quality. The emerging themes were discovered, their relationships were demonstrated and the research gaps were identified. A new classification system positioned in the project lifecycle stages is presented.


2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 916-936 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lance W. Saunders ◽  
Andrew P McCoy ◽  
Brian M. Kleiner ◽  
Helen Lingard ◽  
Tracy Cooke ◽  
...  

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to advance knowledge on the advantages of integrating safety earlier in the construction project lifecycle. Design/methodology/approach – A case study approach is used to collect data from construction sites in the USA, which performs poorly in construction safety and health, and Australia (AU), which performs well in construction safety and health. Qualitative data are collected to determine how and when safety is considered in the project lifecycle in both countries, and then the results are benchmarked to determine the benefits of addressing safety earlier in the process. Findings – Data show that addressing a potential hazard earlier in the project lifecycle has performance benefits in terms of the level of hazard control. Research limitations/implications – The processes that are identified as possibly explaining the performance difference are just based on qualitative data from interviews. Targeted research addressing the relationship between these processes and safety outcomes is an opportunity for further research. Practical implications – The case study data are used to identify specific processes that are used in AU that might be adopted in the USA to improve performance by integrating safety earlier into the decision-making process. Social implications – This paper highlights the advantages of integrating safety as a decision factor early in the process. Worker safety is not just an issue in the construction industry, and thus the findings are applicable to all industries in which worker safety is an issue. Originality/value – This paper advances the safety in design literature by quantitatively supporting the link between when a hazard is addressed and performance. It also links the results to specific processes across countries, which advances the literature because most research in this area to data is within a single country.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-30
Author(s):  
Adam Aruldewan S.Muthuveeran ◽  
Osman Mohd Tahir ◽  
Roziya Ibrahim ◽  
Saipol Bari Abd Karim ◽  
Elly Widiyanty Rasidin

2021 ◽  
pp. 80-94
Author(s):  
Khadija Ouazzani-Touhami ◽  
◽  
Mohammed EL Arass ◽  
Nissrine Souissi

This paper investigates the potential of discrete event simulation for the analysis and evaluation of public strategies and policies and discusses the opportunities offered by the use of a simulation project lifecycle. Following this cycle, we evaluate a public policy use case, the voluntary departure operation initiated in Morocco in 2005, and analyses the success rate of this operation, as well as its impact on the Moroccan pension fund, and this for the period from 2005 to 2025. The results of this simulation highlighted, as already indicated in the Court of Auditors' reports, the irrelevance of this operation, particularly from a financial point of view.


2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 130-137
Author(s):  
Mehryar Nooriafshar

This paper is based on an ongoing research project. Its main purpose is to demonstrate the effectiveness of adopting the project lifecycle approach to learning Project Management through an interactive multimedia system. This multimedia system, referred to as the interactive tool (or the tool) in the paper, is a flash based environment. It can be accessed from either the local storage device of a computer or the Internet under both Microsoft and Apple based operating systems. The tool follows the standard lifecycle phases of a project in teaching fundamentals of Project Management at the undergraduate level. In order to demonstrate its learning effectiveness, the tool was put to the test at three different universities in Australia, Japan and Canada. All the participants were taking Project Management as part of their studies. This combination provided the opportunity of studying participants from different learning, linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The test consisted of a specially designed workshop with customisations for each country. The main objective was to measure and gauge the learning outcome in each case. The findings confirmed that all the participants from every group achieved two main goals of learning the field; and enjoying the learning process.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
marco nunes ◽  
Antônio José de Abreu Pina

Projects can be seen as the crucial building blocks whereby organizations execute and implement their short, and long-term strategic vision. Projects are thought to solve problems, drive change, satisfy unique needs, add value, or exploit opportunities, just to name a few. In order to successful deliver projects, project management tools and techniques are applied throughout a project´s lifecycle, essentially to efficiently and in a timely manner, identify and manage project risks. However, according to latest reviewed literature, projects keep failing at an impressive rate. Although research in the project management field argues that such failure rate is due to a huge variety of reasons, it highlights particular importance to a still underexplored and not quite well understood (regarding how it emerges and evolves) risk type, that may lead projects to failure. This risk type, called as corporate behavioral risks, usually emerge, and evolve as organizations work together across a finite period of time (for example, across a project lifecycle) to deliver projects, and is characterized by the mix of countless formal and informal dynamic interactions between the different elements that constitute the different organizations. Understanding the extent to which such corporate behavior influences project´s outcomes, is a breakthrough of high importance that positively impacts two dimensions; first, enables organizations that deliver projects (but not only), to increase the chances of project success, which in turn is a driver of sustainable business, because it allows the development and implementation of effective, and timely corrective measures to project´s tasks and activities, and second, it contributes to the scientific community (on the organizations field), to generate valuable and actionable new knowledge regarding the emergence and evolution of such cooperative risks, which can lead to the development of new theories and approaches on how to manage them. In this work, we propose a heuristic model to efficiently identify and analyze how corporate behavioral risks may influence project´s outcomes. The proposed model in this work, lays its foundations on four fundamental fields ((1) project management, (2) risk management, (3) corporate behavior, and (4) social network analysis), and will quantitatively measure four critical project social networks ((1) communication, (2) problem-solving, (3) advice, and (4) trust) that usually emerge as projects are being delivered, by applying the theory of social network analysis (SNA), more concretely, SNA centrality metrics. The proposed model in this work is supported with a case study to illustrate its implementation across a project lifecycle, and how organizations can benefit from its application.


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