Towards resilient performance for construction projects

Abstract

The construction sector owns a bad reputation in terms of performing on time and within budget. The inherent characteristics of large construction projects of complexity and uncertainty play an essential role in such deviations. While current project management and risk management approaches cannot fully predict, prevent, and enable the successful conquering of disruptions, the resilience-based project management approach seems like a promising solution. However, the resilience concept is still new in the construction industry and few literature works tackled this area with low consensus. Whereas in practice, the concept is still not explicitly used. It is not clear yet what constitutes a resilient construction project and what elements contribute towards resilience. Therefore, this research aims to understand the resilience concept at the level of a construction project, uncover the elements contributing to building resilience and introduce these in one solid framework that aids in building, evaluating and enhancing resilience in construction projects.

Based on an inductive approach this research resulted in a framework, the PRL resilience framework for construction projects, based on theory and practice. To build the framework, related literature work was reviewed, and 16 interviews with professionals experienced in complex construction projects (infrastructure projects) were interviewed. For evaluation, the framework for three study cases and was found acceptable to satisfactory. The framework consists of 87 elements assigned into three dimensions (proactiveness, reactive capacities, and learning), and 15 related project management areas: Client management, stakeholder management, monitoring and control, partners, mother organization, risk management, project manager, project team, schedule management, change management, contract management, project management approach, information management, tender management and design management. The resilience of a construction project can be defined then as the ability of a construction project to overcome disruptive events (preserve its well-functioning and ability to perform to achieve expected targets) fast and without bypassing the current most valuable project objectives thresholds, enabled by proactiveness (Awareness, anticipation, alertness), reactive capacities (absorptive, adaptive, recovery), and learning.

Main future research work related to the resilience of construction projects is suggested as follows: (1) further research towards identifying the weights of each resilience element, (2) link project complexity elements (suggested using TOE framework by Bosch-Rekveldt et al. (2011)), to be used to design and tailor resilience elements from the PRL framework based on project-specific complexity scan, (3) Applying the PRL framework to different types of projects, (4) Investigating the concept of resilience on portfolio level and program levels.