Purpose -The aim of this paper was to investigate in-depth the current approach of managing client requirements in construction and to highlight the significant factors, which contribute to the complexity of managing the requirements in order to define a better approach.Design/methodology/approach -A case study of a leading international global built asset and engineering consultancy organization was conducted over two years. The case study was conducted principally using semi-participant observations supplemented with other qualitative data collection methods (i.e., interviews, questionnaires and document analysis). Thematic analysis was used to analyse the data.Findings -The results highlight major factors associated with the complexity of managing client requirements information, which include: mechanisms for documentation, storage and access, distribution of requirements information between stakeholders and across lifecycle phases of a project, traceability management and the provision of effective change management incorporating dependency checking and impact analysis.Research limitations/implications -The main limitation of the research is the use of an in-depth study of a single organization, which applied the same project management method across all the projects they managed. Further work is planned to develop the proposed framework fully, and develop a software prototype to operationalize and evaluate its industrial applicability with construction projects.Practical implications -The implications of this research is that a better approach to managing requirements information is needed, which will facilitate the design, construction and operations of buildings within budget and time. An integrated framework and an associated tool are suggested to implement the approach.Originality/value -This study identifies major research gaps and problems in the AEC/FM industry; proposes and presents eRIM framework to facilitate lifecycle management of the requirements.
The operational continuity of a business process is an important performance indicator that contributes to the perceived quality of service delivery, hence it is important to understand and monitor the underlying issues that can affect the performance of the process. These issues might have been foreseen at the beginning of the process design and deployment phase, or might have emerged during the execution of the process, and must be viewed as risk threats to the business process. In most cases risk is only considered from the project management angle or from financial, market, insurance and other general business perspective. Operational risk at service provision level receives little attention and thus there is a need to develop methodologies and tools to identify and analyse business operational risks. The authors concentrate on operational risk for business process management by introducing a novel way for applying risk assessment frameworks at the process activity level. The paper briefly reviews existing risk frameworks and selects the COSO framework as the most appropriate for business processes. This framework is modified in order to address and evaluate the main elements of business processes. It defines a statistical approach towards operational risk assessment by quantifying risk factors in each activity within a business process for service provision. A risk forecast is produced for each activity, and for the whole process, to model associated uncertainties and to contribute in identifying the risk factors that affect the business process objectives. To demonstrate the framework, it is applied to a hypothetical process involving setting up a network service. These results help to advise on which risk factors need higher attention in order to achieve successful process fulfilment.
The clamour for sustainable buildings in the construction industry is on the rise. Sustainable buildings reduce building energy consumption, support health, comfort, and wellbeing of building inhabitants without compromising the wellbeing of the earth. Studies have also shown that sustainable buildings make money sense. However, issues relating to process of achieving sustainable buildings goals have not been receiving the attention it requires. Process management is an essential tool which most architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) professionals overlook or do not pay much attention to. If the process is wrong or inadequate, sustainable buildings goals may not be achieved effectively, if achieved at all. This may have significant impacts on future acceptance of sustainable building practices. With the use of existing data in the literature and our research in this field, this paper proposes a holistic approach for achieving the intended benefits of sustainable construction.
Energy Efficient Building (EEB) design requires many simulation tools to support making decisions for optimized building solutions, resulting in frequent interactions between computational tools. Building Information Modeling (BIM) server platforms can support the storage, maintenance, and query of IFC-based building information models. However, the lack of a unified interface to support information exchange and interoperability among different building design and simulation tools has become a bottleneck of the EEB design process. This paper describes an integrated approach at the data level to combining BIMserver and OpenStudio to build a unified EEB data exchange model. Our first step is to build an information exchange bridge between BIMserver and OpenStudio, which will enable different design and simulation tools that are connected to either of them to interoperate and exchange needed data. In the paper, we also discuss the challenges of the seamless integration due to the dependency on both BIMserver and OpenStudio. The integrated approach, which organizes the data flow in a unified model, enabling effective exchange of data, is currently in a beta-testing phase.
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