Effective Management in Construction Industry - Essay Example

Management's role in meeting construction project deadline Introduction Among the most crucial component of any undertaking, whether simple activities or complex projects, is project management. The success or failure of any project is determined by the competence of the individuals or group of individuals that handle every aspect from its planning, implementation, and monitoring. The execution of programs and projects are even complicated when such an event is restricted within the bounds of time. Time bound projects are most common today since the world considers time as a precious input. In the construction industry, there is lots of information available that clearly discuss on construction project life cycles, best practices, and practical recommendations for a successful project. These materials are useful even to construction managers with general knowledge on management. This essay is geared towards putting together the essential components as far as construction manager's roles are concerned in ensuring the timeliness of a specific project. It tries to emphasize the traditional yet crucial management functions such as planning, organizing, staffing, budgeting, and coordinating and its contribution to the completion of the project within deadlines set. This also provides inputs or synthesis of studies related to construction industry that is contributory to improving implementation efficiency and completed projects' quality. Project Management Let us consider a project and its management in the general context in order to understand the process. Project management in the universal context is defined by most literatures as a process by which an idea or project is created, processed, and accepted, and from which resources, whether materials, financial and manpower, are allocated, directed, and carefully coordinated to achieve the goals with the optimum quality, cost, and timeliness (Hendrickson 1998, Jones 2003, FTA 2006:1-9). Based on the definition of the Federal Transit Administration, a project is "made up of a group of interrelated work activities constrained by a specific scope, budget, and schedule to deliver capital assets needed to achieve the strategic goals of an Agency" (2006: 1-3) or a corporate organization for that matter. These aspects hold specifically true for construction projects, over-all goals of which revolve around the idea of delivering the project on time, with quality, and ensuring optimum benefits to the company and the owner. The interrelated tasks inherent in a project, in most cases, require specialized workers to handle and deal with. The efficiency of the management teams in handling the works within a project dictates the pace by which it is done and is among the most crucial in completing the project within the time frame. Besides, it is the management that closely deals with the owner, users or sponsor of a construction project and "it will be wise for any owner to have a clear understanding of the acquisition process in order to maintain firm control of the quality, timeliness and cost of the completed facility."(Hendrickson 1998) There are a lot of approaches to project management that a project manager can use depending on the type of work to be done. Individual projects may vary in their scope of work and life cycle. Recent innovative approaches to project management as far as construction industry is concerned are a subject of many researches and studies in the field. These studies and recommendations from researches can be applied in the actual management of the project. FTA (2006:1-9) states that the project management process begins with identification of the user requirement, project constraints, resource needs, and establishment of realistic objectives to meet the strategic goals. The common life cycle is presented in Figure 1. It usually starts with user demand and ends up to the structures intended usable life. Figure 1 The Project Life Cycle of a Constructed Facility (Hendrickson 1998) The primary concern of the construction manager is delivering the project on a predetermined time when the occupancy begins. However, doing this should not jeopardize quality and cost. A construction manager can complete a project much earlier than schedule by hiring more workers or equipment, but it sacrifices the cost of the construction. Meanwhile, he can produce the project at the lowest cost and sacrifice quality, which is a no-no to construction standards. The ultimate goal is quality and timeliness. Major Roles of Construction Management Implementation of construction projects are planned and controlled by the project manager. The CM should have the capacity to exercise the responsibility of forming and managing a team for support of the project. Prior know-how and experience is a good pre-requisite for a good CM. Since management is a multitask activity, the CM, although allowed to use other managers and experts for specific concerns, must have sufficient knowledge of every task. The project manager serves as the consolidated control over the implementation of the entire project (FTA 2006:1-3). The project owner should understand the predicament of not having a manager in the field, such that he will deal every aspect of design, supplies, personnel, individually from the construction site. The presence of construction manager serves the role of a program manager. Planning The first crucial role of the manager in the project is planning. The project manager has to provide the project team with a road map on how to get the project done. The plan sets out how the project is to be managed, executed, monitored, controlled, and closed through the phases of its life cycle (FTA 2006:3-8). In summary the planning process involves goal setting, tasks and activities identification, resource allocation (material, money, & manpower), risk identification with corresponding alternative mitigation or back-up plan, and scheduling. A sound doable and realistic plan produces the best result. Planning should produce a document that lists the goals with short statements that define what are the final outputs. These would guide whether the goal has been accomplished or not. It also prevents teams from performing unnecessary iteration and improvement on a goal, which has been sufficiently accomplished. Construction managers must see to it that subtasks specified in the project plan that need to be sub-contracted must conform to the shortest doable time period and budgetary estimates must be reasonable and appropriate. Subcontracted tasks should therefore consider realistic time and resource estimates. The most important component of determining resource requirements is to be realistic. One of the most common mistakes project managers make is to underestimate the amount and type of resources required. This leads to projects that run over budget and fall behind schedule. A major source of risk in project management is inaccurate forecasts of project costs, demand, and other impacts (Flyvbjerg 2006:5). There is a wide range of materials available that discusses the processes of detailed planning in construction projects; however, this is not our emphasis here. This section is meant to show that effective and careful project planning is an important input to achieving a project on time. Organizing After defining or creating a doable plan, the next crucial move the management must consider is getting the right people for the right job and putting the right structure that would work best for the project. Hendrickson (1998:2.2) states that recent management practices consider four approaches that help in project organizing. These are: (1) the management process approach, (2) the management science and decision support approach, (3) the behavioral science approach for human resource development, and (4) sustainable competitive advantage. These four complements its other along the process. The management process approach helps in identifying and delineating functions and determines sub-functions, which are crucial in a management process then place it in the management structure. The process would break up complicated functions into a simpler component, which become easy to handle. In the management science and decision approach it is ensured that this component functions are contributory to the decision capabilities of the higher-level management. Identifying subtasks and positions based on this approach uses statistical processes with the aid of state of the art information technology. Another consideration in organizing is behavioral science. This is considered since the organization requires people that behave based on his perceptions and other psychological factors. Sustainable competitive advantage is a guiding principle in achieving quality works through better strategy. The complexity of the organization also depends on the magnitude and size of the project. It is a practical sense to evaluate the organizing need of a construction project based on the budgetary allocation set by the end-user. The fundamental needs of the smallest construction project revolve around the basic work operations including structural (masonry or carpentry), electrical, mechanical (for equipment), and administrative for human resource management. In small-scale projects, all this sections can be handled directly by the project manager. But in larger projects separate section managers can head each section. The complexity of the project dictates also the complexity of the structure. The above approaches can be a good tool to determining the best functional structure for a certain project. If fully harnessed, these approaches would enable a project manager to pool competent workforce and management team that would lead the project to better implementation and on-time completion. Again, one of the limiting factors is budget. Coordinating Coordination is a function of management that ensures better flow of the project implementation. It does not only considers the internal process of managing individual tasks and subtasks but also include the process of ensuring that the project conforms according to the regulations as far as environmental concerns, standards, Zoning, and personal safety, and other government regulations concerning construction. Among the basic regulatory requirements in construction projects is the project location. Before the plan can be fully developed, the location's topography, elevation, and geologic properties of the area - presence of fault lines, etc, zoning - land classification, presence of future government project expansions, and other environmental considerations must be properly accounted. Zonal plans are government documents found in the planning offices of cities in almost every country. These things contribute a lot to the final design and budget of the project. Risk management is another coordinative function the project manager must consider. Risks sometimes cause delays in the project completion. It can be measured in terms of likelihood of failure and impact of Failure (Jenkins 2006:31). In large-scale projects it is proper for the CM to assign a specialist as a risk manager, who will evaluate the potential risks and recommend actions. But is simple projects risk assessment is inherent with specific work areas. The project managers must consider the following actions, recommended by Jenkins (2006:32) in dealing with the risks. Research is done to evaluate and understand the impact and likelihood of a risk. Accept that risk is unavoidable and must be accepted as-is. Anticipation therefore becomes the key to dealing with this category of risk. Reduce the risk to a manageable level. Eliminate the risk if possible. Another major concern in the coordinative function of the project manager is the welfare of the manpower component of the project. The most important capital of any construction project is the labor force. The Risk Management aspect mentioned earlier must deal not only the project completion but the welfare of the workers within the project area. Aside from the mandatory requirement for safety such as the use of construction helmets, gloves, goggles, and protective devices and basic compensatory requirements such as standard salary, social security benefits, insurance, and others, other basic support services like temporary shelter at construction site, basic safety training, emergency medical facility, and other related support are required for the workers. While the project implementation is going on and at the time the project is completed, changes occur in the designs and actual construction process. Change is a normal and expected part of the construction flow. It can be the result of necessary design modifications, differing site conditions, material availability, owner-requested changes, value engineering and impacts from third parties, and others. Because of this, coordinating function of the project manager requires that this changes be documented as in an as-built plan (Pettee 2005). This is a useful tool in evaluating the final project output and in future modifications and maintenance activities. Budgeting Budget is sometimes the limiting factor in every project. Therefore it requires that a project manager must understand the nitty-gritty part of budgeting. As Jenkins put it "If scheduling is an art then costing could be considered a black art" (2006:29). Simple projects are relatively straightforward to cost but complicated projects are not. It requires careful evaluation of every cost item. Studies have shown that forecasts of cost, demand, and other impacts of planned projects have remained constantly and remarkably inaccurate for decades (Flyvbjerg 2006:6). There are two possible scenarios in budgeting, either a project is designed based on a set budget or it is designed based on the desired output and the budget determined. Either situation can be complicated depending on the needs of the end-user. However, there are more adjustments to be made in projects with predetermined budget. In whichever scenario, the initial steps in coming up with the budget are costing every task within the prepared plan. Costing is usually integrated in the planning stage. Once costing is in place, appropriate budget can be prepared to secure the requisite funds. With the help of accounting specialists cash flow and expenditure schedules can be prepared to ensure better fund management once the project is implemented. During implementation a regular budget reviews, which examine the state of your finances and your expenditure to date, must be conducted and adjustments to the planned budget can be made accordingly. Better budget plan and cash management will also help in timely completion of the project. The construction managers, with the help of accounting managers must play a big role in the execution of better financial plan. Heyworth (2002:21) provided some useful budgeting tips, which can be seriously considered. Among which is to have one person responsible for authorizing expenditure, so that the budget isn't overspent. Control of expenditures must be delegated to somebody who really understands the project budget and its limitations. He also stated that in actual scenario "budgets never work out exactly, since some things cost more while occasionally less than you think." It is wise therefore to add extra 5% percentage for unforeseen expenditure. And another thing, If you are over budget, don't try to hide the facts. Present the problem as clearly as you can to those in charge so that adjustments can be made. Conclusion Hendrickson (1998) states that the greatest stumbling block to effective management in construction is the inertia and historic divisions among planners, designers and constructors. A construction project could be able to avail highly competent designers, engineers, and managers but without the social cohesiveness of the project management working as a team, the project is still bound to fail. Management therefore has the challenge of pooling not only technical competence but also the management competence of these technical managers. Teamwork can be developed just as technical knowledge can be developed. The goal of every construction project has been laid, focused on delivering the optimum quality within the required time frame and providing cost-effective advantage to both the user and the builder, the task that remains is for the project management team would join hands to achieving the goal. References Federal Transit Administration (2006). Construction Management Handbook [online] available from < http://www.fta.dot.gov/documents/Construct_Proj_Mangmnt_ CD.pdf> [May 16, 2008] Flyvbjerg, B. (2006) 'From Nobel Prize to Project Management: Getting Risks Right.' Project Management Journal, vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 5-15. Jenkins, N. (2006) A Project Management Primer [online] available from [May 17, 2008] Jones, M. (2003). The Lasa Computanews Guide to Project Management [online] available from [May 17, 2008] Hendrickson, C. (1998) Project Management for Construction Fundamental Concepts for Owners, Engineers, Architects and Builders [online] available from [May 16, 2008] Heyworth, F. (2002) A Guide to Project Management [online] available from [May 17, 2008] Pettee, S. (2005). 'As-builts - Problems & Proposed Solutions' Construction Management Association of America [online] available from [May 16, 2008] Read More