Public Construction Organization Research Articles

Project Management Maturity and Performance of Building Construction Projects in Myanmar

Maturity models are credited with raising project management awareness, but no conclusive evidence supports their use as a tool for performance enhancement in construction project settings. The present study thus examined the influence of time, cost, and quality management maturity on performance indices of building construction projects in Myanmar. The study further assessed how maturity in time, cost, and quality varied between public and private construction organizations. Four building construction projects, i.e., two operated by private construction organizations and two operated by public construction organizations in Myanmar, have been chosen for the data collection. The project manager and an individual from the upper management of each project were interviewed in three stages to obtain the maturity level. The performance indices of each project were evaluated quantitatively. The study’s findings revealed a positive relationship between project management maturity and project performance. Specifically, a higher time management maturity contributed to greater time performance, and elevated cost management maturity projected higher cost performance. Contrary to the expectations, the study could not find a significant relationship between quality management maturity and quality performance. The results further revealed that the average time management maturity of public construction organizations was significantly higher. Still, the average cost and quality management maturity were considerably lower than that of private construction organizations. The construction organizations aiming to enhance the project performance should focus on reaching a higher maturity in time and cost management knowledge areas.

Relational Partnership in Public Construction Organizations: Front-Line Employee Perspective

AbstractThe adoption of relational contracting (RC) has been increasingly used by parties in various developed countries as one of the innovative tools in traditional contracting to achieve benefit...

Leadership Grid between Concern for People and Intuition

Intuition has been recognized as an established factor in human psychology and thinking. In this paper we present the results of our study of the prevalence and exercise of intuition in a public construction organization. We found that a majority of engineers believe in the use of intuition, trust it, and use it in their practice. We hypothesized that the use of intuition and concern for people might be correlated. However, no such relationship was discovered. Nevertheless, we found that project engineers and senior resident engineers/area engineers had the same general perception of intuition and also used intuition in their decision-making processes. The engineers we surveyed have a high interest in the welfare of colleagues, but work primarily for their own personal gains. They have a high concern for the safety and health of the public and feel affronted by corruption. They also claim a high level of loyalty to their organization. The scores of the engineers we surveyed generally fall into a zone repr...

Behavioural perceptions of design and construction engineers

Hemisphericity in behaviour studies is the role and dominance of right bran/left brain in the human brain, each side of which has varying roles and characteristics, thereby leading to different thinking orientations in the human. A study was conducted to measure the hemisphericity orientation of construction and design engineers in a large public construction organization. We know from literature that people of different hemisphericity orientations have unlike personalities and dissimilar perspectives of specific situations. The essential characteristics of hemisphericity as established in literature are presented and used in analysing the organization. From this study of engineers, it was seen that construction engineers in the organization, State Department of Engineering Construction (SDEC), are predominantly left‐brained while design engineers are predominantly right‐brained. This difference in orientation partially explains why the design and construction engineers at SDEC are unable to see eye‐to‐eye in issues concerning implementation of drawings. Left hemisphere dominant engineers are also seen to desire more organizational changes than their right hemisphere dominant counterparts. Ideally, researchers believe that a 50–50 distribution of hemisphericities in large organizations is desirable. Details, analysis, and recommendations are presented in the paper.

Assessment of Organizational Change for Public Construction Organizations

This paper explores change management for restructuring a public construction organization. The paper presents a model for organizational change and studies 20 change-management parameters for three engineering management levels—area engineers, project managers, and project engineers. The researchers studied the perception of engineers and the change process from initiation through completion, starting with forces that destabilize, spreading to awareness and management of anxiety, then acceptance and management of tasks, and finishing with integration and restart. These were examined quantitatively and qualitatively. The study concluded that engineers realize that changes are necessary but they perceive change management negatively. Though most engineers are aware of and committed to change, they perceive the communication of changes to be poor. Recommendations were made to adopt a participative style, improve the commitment of upper leadership, and apply incentives to implement changes. The organizational change model provides a simplified approach for any organization going through the process of change and reengineering.