Designing Construction Management

Abstract

“Who of us would not be happy to lift the veil behind which the future is hidden and to focus our thoughts on the unknown future” (Shepherd & Williams, 2015). What if we already know our unknowns, would it not be a piece of cake to deliver construction projects of high quality within time and budget? In order to predict the unknown future, Fluor introduced Construction-Driven Execution philosophy. In a construction-driven project, construction managers are involved early in the process during front-end engineering and design (FEED) to provide input to office departments in order to prevent mistakes from happening in later stages of the project. By this it is aimed to ‘lift the veil’ and focus on the unknown knowns (i.e. complex issues) in an integrated effort.

Construction managers typically focus on operational decisions during construction on-site and focus on tactical and strategical decision-making during FEED. This transition has a major impact on the way construction managers should approach issues in their daily functioning: they shift from a firefighting to a fire preventing approach. In this perspective, the role of construction managers in FEED is compared to that of project managers, in which the construction manager is responsible for the management of the execution portion of the project.

The Project Design School assumes that some kind of design thinking is involved by project managers, in which they use a certain frame and go through certain steps when approaching complex issues. To apply this frame for educational purposes, the Project Design School has created the Project Design Cycle. This cycle consists of four elements: Awareness, Design, Performance and Reflection. The Project Design School aims to fill a literature gap in project management research, which concerns the approach project managers use when choosing and adapting project management tools and systems to be applied in specific situations. These two problem fields of Construction-Driven Execution and the Project Design School are combined into the following research objective:

1. Gather and provide empirical data to firmly establish the ubiquity of the Project Design Cycle elements, their cyclic relationship, and the degree to which managers use these elements as an explicit method,

2. Provide Fluor with advice on how to apply design thinking principles (as incorporated in the Project Design Cycle) within the construction management department in order to enhance the Construction-Driven Execution philosophy.

In order to achieve this objective, the following research question is answered in this report:
-> How can the Project Design Cycle enable construction managers to identify and approach complex situations in a construction-driven FEED phase?
A theoretical framework and empirical research are conducted to answer this question. First, a theoretical framework is determined, which includes the influence of Construction-Driven Execution on construction management practices in FEED and the incorporation of design thinking principles in the Project Design Cycle. Subsequently, the current application of the Project Design Cycle by construction managers is researched in a qualitative case-study analysis. In total five construction managers (respondents) are selected of three oil & gas projects (case-studies). Each respondent is interviewed twice by use of semi-structured interviews. The main goal of the first interview is to get background information of the respondent and to identify complex issues they were confronted with in their current project. The complex issues are discussed in-depth in the second interview, in order to analyze the Project Design Cycle elements in the applied approach of the respondents in their daily practice.

The main findings obtained in the cross-case analysis are:
- The respondents often did not recognize or perceive the complexity of the issues. It is observed that the recognition of the complexity has a large influence on the way the respondents approach issues. Issue-categories that were perceived as complex concern: modularization, pre-assembly, sequencing of work and revising the plot plan. Alignment of disciplines is not recognized as complex by the respondents. From the twenty issues identified in the first interview, ten were defined as complex in the cross-case analysis.
- When an issue is recognized as complex, nearly all Project Design Cycle elements were applied most of the times by the respondent. However, the sequence of the elements was often not correct. The design element was conducted separately (generate and test) sometimes.
- When an issue is not recognized as complex, it is observed that practically always one or two Project Design Cycle elements were not applied by the respondents. It is found that the design element is recognized the least, followed by performance. Moreover, it is observed that the sequence is most likely not to be performed in the correct order.

It can be concluded that construction managers do apply the elements of the Project Design Cycle in their daily function in FEED. However, only when the issue is recognized as complex. Thus, the approach of the construction manager strongly depends on their ability to identify and recognize complexity elements within issues. Furthermore, it is found that the design element is most likely not to be applied when the issue is not recognized as complex. This indicates that the searching and experimenting nature of design thinking is often not applied by the respondents in this situation. It is observed that the construction managers fall back in their on-site problem-solving mode when they do not recognize the complexity of the issue. In this simplified problem-solving approach, the respondents go straight from awareness of the problem to the performance of a solution. The design and reflection elements are often skipped in such approaches.

It is determined that the Project Design Cycle provides a suitable framework to educate and support construction managers in approaching complex issues in FEED. However, the Project Design Cycle needs to be adjusted in order to create acceptance and support within the construction management community. Based on the empirical research, the Project Design Cycle has been transformed to the ADAPT – decision-making cycle (figure 1: ADAPT). ADAPT is an abbreviation of the elements Awareness, Development, Assessment, Performance, and Throw-back. In this research context, the essence of ADAPT is precisely that: construction managers have to adapt in order to change something (their approach) to suit different conditions (construction-driven FEED). By doing so, they “have to become familiar with a new situation”, which represents the new role and responsibilities they have to fulfill in order to solve complex issues in the early stages of the project.

ADAPT incorporates the identification of complexities, development and assessment of alternatives, creation of a solution with the highest value, and a reflection upon the outcome. This framework can be used to educate and support construction managers by improving their capabilities and skills that are required to approach complex issues during FEED. ADAPT serves a double purpose in construction management practices and could be applied in the form of a cognitive processing model and in the form of a decision support system:

- Cognitive processing model: remind and support construction managers not to make decision merely based on old experiences, but to take their time to properly reflect on situations and share their knowledge in order to identify, recognize and acknowledge complex situations.

- Decision support system: structure constructability meetings to approach complex issues in a multi-disciplinary way and to provide construction managers the ability to get an understanding of the problem situation, in order to determine an effective course of action by drawing upon the entire repository of construction management research, knowledge and tools.

It is recommended to implement ADAPT both top-down and bottom-up. Top-down support is required to estimate enough man-hours for construction managers in FEED and by selecting the right people that are able to approach complex issues. Additionally, ADAPT should be implemented bottom-up as an integrated approach in which the construction manager is pro-active and takes it upon themselves to drive, adopt, and move it forward. This can be done by making individual construction managers aware of the cycle and its added value.

Moreover, the constructability program serves as a perfect platform to implement and test the application of ADAPT. In constructability, multiple disciplines work together to create integrated solutions in order to prevent ‘fires’ from happening on-site. ADAPT can be used as a structure to identify complex situations in the constructability program. These identified complex issues can then be discussed in so called ‘constructability focus’ sessions. In these sessions the focus is put on a specific component or sub-area of the design that contains high complexity, by a multidisciplinary team. As construction management lead these sessions, it is a perfect opportunity to implement the ADAPT decision-making cycle and use its elements to shape and formalize these sessions in a structured way. Additionally, by being aware of the elements, and in special ‘throw-back’, construction managers learn to share their knowledge with other colleagues, disciplines, and projects. In this way, awareness is created for future situations and enables others to identify and solve complex situations in an early stage.

Further research should be performed to investigate the underlying reasons of why and when construction managers perceive issues as complex (or not), how construction managers could identify complex situations in the FEED phase, and which qualifications are required of construction managers to properly function in a construction-driven FEED phase. Also, the relation between the recognition of complexity and the occurrence of the design element need to be further examined. Finally, further research should be conducted to determine the effectiveness of the application of the Project Design Cycle (in the form of ADAPT) in construction management.