Nature of Construction
Nature of construction has been widely criticised by many researchers including Latham (1994) and Egan (1998). Based on the nature of construction, complex and intangible project activity, uniqueness and low repetition, temporary construction project and labour intensity are observed as the barriers have led to high level of coordination failures. Thus, there are four key barriers under the nature of construction identified in this paper and are discussed thoroughly in the following sub sections.
Complexity and Intangibility of Project Activity
According to Chris (2009), construction project involves myriads of interrelated activities, tasks and work packages. One construction project may possibly make up to thousand of activities (Saram et al, 2009), from substructure work to the external work. Every single activity requires the input of participants who have different and sole roles as well as technical expertise. With these complexities, construction has repeatedly distinguished the process of working and involving numerous and heterogeneous participants (Kubicki et al, 2006). The fragmentation and non-integration of the construction process increase the adversarial relationships among participants. They lack attention to explore other works, they are unwilling to cooperate, and they have been embedded with selfish objectives and blame culture of time delays of their tasks. Thereby, this key barrier is observed as one of the main causes of poor coordination problems in construction.
Uniqueness and Low Repetition
According to Jeff (1994), construction not only covers wide ranges of end products but varies from one project to another. The uniqueness of construction characterized by its non-repetitive activities, such as design, process, procurement, participants, location, method and techniques (Kubicki et al, 2007). Unlike construction, manufacturing is a high degree of repetitive operation, high level of standardization, permanent and stable workforces as well as permanent location. These features have shown that working processes in manufacturing are tightly integrated and ordered. Adversely, construction participants face a difficulty to define the routine and repetitive processes, as well as input and output in construction project. In such varying processes, project personnel find it difficult to discern the long-term relationships and objectives, which may emerge in previous cooperated project. They are trying to identify customers’ and stakeholders’ expectations (Saram et al, 2009) and cause the poor communication and fail to understand correctly, eventually leading to poor quality of construction end products. This situation is further complicated by the fact that most project participants carry out their function roles in purpose only in low repetitive nature of the working process (Saram et al, 2009). The reluctance of learning the new skills led to no skills development, whilst they are found difficulty in every new project. Hence, more efforts of coordination should be urged to motivate and initiate the new learning curve for new personnel of a construction project. From the above discussion, it is concluded that this key barrier is the crucial factors that make managing coordination processes more difficult.
Temporary Construction Project
Average time frame of construction project lasts merely in few years in different geographic locations. The temporary nature of the construction project requires new resources such as new participants, materials, technologies and working methods to achieve the “new born” project. The complexity can make it extremely difficult for new project participants to coordinate disparate parties who may never have worked together before (Saram, 2002). According to Stephen and Christopher (2007), construction individuals and organizations have to be creative and ready in cooperating and coordinating through varying conditions. However, this ideal coordination has rarely existed among construction project participants. It is even worse that participants are reluctant to share information and their technical knowledge because they believe that the temporary time frame of construction projects often impede the establishment of trust (Cheng et al, 2010). Thus, it is observed that this key barrier with lack of commitment for sharing and communication has lead to a high level of poor coordination in terms of conflict and disputes.
Labour Intensity
According to Geneva (2001), there were an excess of 111 million construction workers worldwide in 1998, most of them were in the low-and middle-income countries. These countries of the world show only 23 per cent of global construction output but have 74 per cent of the total employment. It can be inferred from the above that the “labour intensity” of construction life is not uncommon, especially in the low-income countries. At the same time, construction sector also contributes to the high employment if compared to other sector, namely manufacturing. In manufacturing industry, labour intensity is instead of high degree of industrialization to perform the manufacturing activity. Industrialization has adopted the technological innovation to produce the end product in a more efficient, cheaper way and in mass production. Nevertheless, only the characteristic of high repetitiveness of procedures, process and production in manufacturing are appropriate to industrialization. In comparison with manufacturing industry, uniqueness and low repetition have aggravated industrialization in the construction industry. Up to now, a large number of labours or labour intensity is required in construction project rather than the adoption of automation and technology innovation. A torrent of labours involved, uncontrollable management and poor communication take place between management and personnel. Chain of command from top to bottom management and personnel may also take time and experience to detect information errors during the exchange, and eventually this key barrier causes the challenges of coordination labours.
Traditional Contractual Arrangement
In general, design-bid-build is recognized as traditional contracting system and it is the most common form in delivering the construction project (Greco, 2006; Gehrig, 2009). Design-bid-build is characterized by fragmentation, uneven risk allocation, lowest-bid-price and multi-layer of subcontracting that discourages coordination in a project. These key barriers under traditional contractual arrangement thus will be further developed in the following four sub sections.
Fragmentation of Construction Process
Traditional contracting approach or design-bid-build has been widely applied around the globe (Greco, 2006; Gehrig, 2009). Design-bid-build has experienced the three-step processes throughout the design, bid and build phases (Gehrig, 2009). Thus, this contracting approach is awarded apart from different contracts from design professional and contractors (Gehrig, 2009). Due to the rupture in contracts, it distinguishes the design and construction processes, thereby exasperating its process. In this context, the said approach does not promote integration of parties involved in design and construction phases (Baiden et al, 2006). As a result, a lot of problems arise due to design deficiencies during the construction process, such as products that could not be built as designed and could not be efficiently constructed (Rosli, 2004). According to Madelsohn (1997), 75 percent of the problems on the construction site are generated in the design phase. Nevertheless, its origin can be traced back to the adversary nature of traditional contractual arrangement. In the early stage of conceptual design, the contractor is discouraged to provide their technical knowledge and opinion complimenting the design and buildability issues, and thereby resulting in poor communication, little team working, lack of information and knowledge sharing. Therefore, this key barrier has been observed as one of the main factor that contributes to the poor coordination.
Uneven Risk Allocations
According to Thompson (1995), risks are derived from uncertainty of project activities and thus affect the objectives achievement of the project. Risks obviously exist in the nature of the construction industry and cannot be easily eliminated (Kangari, 1995). Hence, some studies were carried out to investigate the resolution of risks in construction project. Kubicki et al (2006), claim that contractual arrangement plays a pivotal role in risk minimization in construction. This can be explained through the duties and responsibilities of a party depending on individual contractual arrangement (Greco, 2006), which have a significant impact on the risk allocation to project participants. In traditional contracting approach, contracts are separately awarded for the designing professional and contractor (Gehrig, 2009). In this context, although a single point of contact and contact responsibility for all performances during the project does not exist (Anderson et al, 2002), it creates multiple and different roles from different contracts in this contracting system. Due to the uncommon responsibilities by separate contracts, lack of commitment and blame culture appears among participants, which ultimately leads to the challenges of coordination among them (Kubicki et al, 2006).
Lowest-Bid-Winner
Competitive tendering is the most popular tendering applied in traditional contractual arrangement or design-bid-build (Greco, 2006). In competitive tendering, contractors face two seemingly incompatible and contradictory objectives. They must bid high enough to make a profit, yet low enough to get a job at the same time. However, it is difficult for a contractor to balance between both at the same time (Park, 1979). Often, prices were driven down by the competitive pressures (Park, 1979) and usually awarded to the lowest price bidder (Abdul-Hadi, 1999). Therefore, contractors typically focus upon meeting their contractual requirements at the lowest possible price. They may be limited to commitment to achieve the client’s primary objectives or to any perceived project team (Pryke, 2009). As a result, they lack willingness to cooperate and coordinate with other participants across construction industry processes, and consequently make the coordination more challenging.
Multi-Layer Subcontracting
A single main contractor is impossible to control all related project tasks in a construction project. Thus, delivery of construction projects is usually handled by numerous subcontractors with different task packages. In general, larger project will require more than one layer in the subcontracting management. The main contractor not only subcontracts the job to subcontractors, but the first subcontractor may also subcontract this contract to another organization or further subcontract it (Chiang, 2009). Unfortunately, these subcontracting systems often have not been effectively managed (Tam et al, 2011). Hence, lack of adequate control and supervision by main contractors over subcontractors’ work and complexity of communication and information flow have led to poor coordination in such subcontracting.
Construction Participants
The myriad of activities in construction constrains the large number of participants to carry out a task (Hanrot, 2003). They are multi-disciplinary and each has the character of interdependent roles in construction project, thereby rendering it difficult for them in coordination. Unfavourably, adversarial relationships and uncommon objectives among participant aggravate the problems of coordination. Thus, these three key barriers of faultless coordination under construction participants will be discussed thoroughly in the following sub sections.
Myriad and Multi-Discipline
Construction is based on project organisation and associated myriads of participants such as client, architect, designer and contractor throughout its process. Each player has different roles, technicality and service which contribute to each task in construction. In such complexities, multi-disciplinary of the participants causes a lack of match between the technical interdependence of the work and their organizational independence (Higgin and Jessop, 1965). This can be explained by the limited knowledge and expertise of a participant towards the other works, which are running over their boundaries. Therefore, this results in the adversarial relationship, problematic communication and incomplete information flows, which is eventually perceived as key barrier of close coordination among participants.
Adversarial Relationships
Construction is a harsh environment due to its narrow, win-lose interest and short-term arrangement of business relationship (Chuah, 2003). In general, ideal relationship among participants is very rare in construction projects. According to Pryke (2009), management of relationships is a core competency in construction, and furthermore, a quality of relationships that is a key element in the success of a project. Hence, effective and harmonious relationship must take place in functioning the cooperation and integration of participants in construction project. Nevertheless, contractual arrangement in construction traditionally does not promote a quality relationship and more intensely leads to adversarial relationships, and ultimately creates poor coordination.
Uncommon Objectives
Construction participants were criticized for their uncommon objectives in a similar project. Ankrah and Langford (2005) state that construction participants have different objectives to describe their approaches for work and relationships with other project participants, thereby leading to the conflict at the interface level in one respect. Chuah (2003) also claims that objectives of construction are based on narrow and win-lose arrangement. However, the creation of these problems can be traced back to the continuous use of traditional contracting strategy, commitment to which is awarded separately (Gehrig, 2009). In this arrangement, each participant has a certain and sole objective to accomplish the project as stated in the contract. Hence, a common objective has rarely existed in construction. Adversely, selfish objective is apparent in construction, it therefore exasperates the coordination process.
Characteristic of Organization
According to Stephen and Christopher (2007), the characteristic of the people involved and structure of their organizations are fundamentally crucial in ensuring the coordination during the construction process. Nevertheless, organisational design in construction characterized by being temporary and project-based has exasperated the coordination among them, which are further discussed in the following two sub-sections.
Temporary Organisation
Stephen and Christopher (2007) claim that the organisation is inevitably stable as its size and culture will change over time. Ad hoc of construction organisation only lasts from 12 to 24 months. In the temporary nature of the organisation, participants have less opportunity to develop long-term working relationships. They are devilishly difficult to build strong communication networks and continually no room for improvement in their work (Stephen and Christopher, 2007). Therefore, it seems impossible to establish a formal coordination in temporary organisation due to shortage of time to communicate and integrate the information flow among different agencies. Due to the constant change of organisation, these problems have led to a difficulty in managing coordination processes in construction.
Project–Based Arrangement
In construction project, team members such as an architect, designer, contractor and supplier have collaborating together in the project-based organisation structure. Hence, this organisation is dependent on a large number of individuals representing different roles and responsibilities. In such complexities, coordination within their expertise and technical knowledge is a necessity to the success of the project in terms of the lean time of information flow, chain of command and decision making. Nevertheless, the varity of priorities and decision of each participant involved grades the problem in coordination, which eventually leads to duplicity of work, delay in work done and an increase in the project cost (Jha and Lyer, 2007). As a result, the project-based organisation structure is observed as one of the key barriers of coordination in construction project.
Construction Management Approach
Management approach predominately contributes to improved competitiveness and core business. However, traditional management system in construction has been carried out informally and leads to difficulty in managing the communication and coordination of construction participants. This claim is supported by Saram et al (2009) who note that management mode in construction has been carried out in informal approach. Crichton (1966) also further claims that the informal management has drawn from direct surveillance at work and confers on the works they were doing. The overall processes are not formally documented in handbooks or formal reports of the construction. This results in no previously set methods of obtaining inputs, processing and delivering outputs of vital information in construction (Saram, 2002). This can make it devilishly difficult for participants to communicate without proof or “black and white” documents, thereby leading to high level of conflicts and disputes in a project. Moreover, they are required to establish the new learning curve for every process, as well as the repetitive process. Even so, every process is varying, thus this practice leads to the barriers of effective and efficient coordination among participants.
Summary
Criticisms of poor performance are not uncommon in the construction industry, and coordination is observed as the best solution to this dilemma. However, construction is still in its infancy level of coordination. The reason behind this phenomenon has attracted the author focus on studies of barriers to employ coordination in construction. Therefore, key barriers of coordination in construction have been investigated by this paper to achieve its objective. A total of five groups of key barriers are observed including the nature of construction, traditional contractual arrangement, construction participant, characteristic of organization and construction management approach. In providing a better understanding, each sub-group is studied thoroughly and summarized by the diagram in this paper. This paper is underpinned by the literature review of theoretical, conceptual and key barriers of construction project coordination. The objectives of the study are successfully achieved by conversation of literature in pioneering the key barriers of coordination in construction project. This study outlines the basic ideas to improve the existing poor performance of construction through emphasizing concerns towards the key barriers of coordination. It is because coordination is observed as a prerequisite to a success of construction project. Once the key barriers are identified, it becomes also easier for future construction participants to develop strategies to tackle these barriers for optimal improvement of the overall project performance. On the long run, it may increase the utmost concern of construction participants in coordinating their project and escalating implementation of the innovative management and procurement systems in the construction industry. This study also initiates a worthwhile new research topic in developing the measurement of coordination performance, which has potential to combine and convert these barriers factors into the key performance indicators (KPI). Thus, it is no longer impossible to assess coordination performance level of construction project in the future. In addition, further study also need to be undertaken to analyse more precisely the effect of coordination on a construction project success through incorporating the coordination into critical success factors of construction, so that reality views of the powerful influences of coordination on a construction project success can materialize.
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