General contractor's project of projects – a meta-project: understanding the new paradigm and its implications through the lens of entropy

Abstract

Why do Koskela and others argue that the underlying theory of project management (PM) is obsolete? Project management works for the manufacturing industry, and for the construction industry at both the physical production level and the subcontractor level. Stakeholders, including the owner (along with due diligence, and O&M teams), architect (and the design team), general contractor (and its subcontractor team) create, transmit, process, manage and use information. The boundary between information (creation and transmission) and physical production is where PM controls and predicts cost and schedule and where quality controls fail to work as intended. This paper argues that subcontractors give project numbers for the physical part of the project, while general contractors' project numbers are actually a project of projects (those of the subcontractors). The general contractor manages a meta-project (term and definition, as related to building construction, coined by Fernandez-Solis). The meta-project paradigm has significant consequences and is the key to a novel understanding of the general contractor role. Lean construction's percent (or promise) plan complete (PPC) gages the reliability of promises made, is a useful and viable indicator of the quality of the schedule, and serves as a surrogate measure of project flow -how smoothly or chaotically a project runs. The PPC is operationalized as an index that meta-project stakeholders can use to calibrate the reliability of work in progress and provide feedback on the predictability/variability of logistic plans. The methodology of this paper uses conceptual analysis, the metonymic mapping of key concepts from the thermodynamics domain to the construction domain and showcases the concepts through PPC case studies. Information entropy theories are discerned in the PPC reports. In conclusion, scientific information theories, principles and characteristics of flow, in contrast to managerial principles, provide a clearer background for visualizing a novel understanding of the state of the project flow at the meta-project level. It could be argued that this paper is about defining a reference discipline and construed as "construction science viewed through the lens of entropy" but this is not the focus of this paper but the topic of the next.

Risks Caused by Information Asymmetry in Construction Projects: A Systematic Literature Review

“…The earliest research on information asymmetry in construction projects can be located in the Level II group (see [43,45,46,84]). The concept of information asymmetry was applied in research on the following: risk-sharing ratios between the client and contractor [85,86], affordability of new technologies and [10,45,46,87,88]; general contractor behavior in cases of subcontracting [84,89]; causes of cost overruns and low profitability [90][91][92][93]; inter-organizational trust asymmetry behavior in construction projects [94]; opportunistic behavior of agents in construction projects [95][96][97][98]; bid calculations for construction projects [99]; different types of contracts and incentive mechanisms [43,[100][101][102][103]; implementation of BIM in construction projects [104,105], procurement process [106]; supervision strategies of clients [107]; and effectiveness of safety monitoring in the construction industry [108].…”

“…Before the contract is signed, the client should employ strategies that would help to recognize the characteristics of agents, the so-called screening. This includes the investigation of agents [59,81,89], verification of bidding offers (compared to the market or probabilistic calculations) [30,45,46,75,81], or asking for guarantees from agents [48,71,75,81], advanced payments [29], or bank insurance [55]. Agents can also signal their characteristics with certificates [52] and advertising [52,75].…”