Title
Construction projects succeed as a result of interaction and interplay of factors such as understanding of client complexity, emergent requirements, and perceptions of different stakeholders in the construction industry.
Background
Construction projects are regarded to be either ‘successful’ or ‘failed’ differently by different stakeholders in the construction industry. Perceptions among the key stakeholders in the industry, mostly the practitioners and the clients, continue to differ, a fact that affects many construction projects.
For instance, projects that have been considered failed by the practitioners have received positive response from clients where such projects are seen to be success by the clients (Thomson 2011).
This difference in perception has been captured in one major research work in the industry carried out by Derek Thomson who found out that construction practitioners tend to view a project to be successful when such project has the ability to meet the client’s requirements, largely formulated and outlined during the commencement of a project (Thomson 2011).
As a result, such projects lack stakeholders’ contribution and enrichment of the initial outlined requirements as the project progress, a situation that leads to many clients viewing such projects as failed (Rowlinson and Cheung 2008 cited in Thomson 2011).
What construction practitioners fail to understand or internalize by adopting this approach is that, by ignoring client dialogue, there is little under-utilization and appreciation of constructive and potential emerging solutions largely developed from the client’s socially constructed perception of the improved understanding of construction requirements.
On overall, the construction industry heavily relies on performance goals and metrics formulated as the project takes off (Chan 2003). However, in the modern world where there is increasing growth of stakeholders in the construction industry, there is rise of clash of perception, as the theory of social construct would postulate.
There is need to recognize that the emerging and increasing client judgments regarding the success or failure of construction projects is heavily impacting the construction industry and it cannot be ignored.
As a result, in the recent times there have been suggestions that construction practitioners need to change their long time perception on the success of projects and in turn incorporate the views of multiple stakeholders in the industry, specifically the views of the clients. This is not only important but necessary given that identifying and appreciating client awareness of projects improves as projects progress.
Given the above understanding this research will investigate the issue of changing perception of key stakeholders in the construction industry and how and how such perception change impact the construction projects.
Objectives of the research will premise on the need for the construction practitioners to identify new project success goals apart from the initials ones; formalized time cost and performance goals. Also, there will be effort to study and explain why the construction practitioners need to recognize the client awareness of requirements as past research work indicate that such requirements improves as projects progress (Thomson 2011).
Further, there will be need to show that existence of internal conflict involving multiple client stakeholders should form the basis upon which construction practitioners are able to identify ad implement emerging project solutions that fulfills clients needs requirements.
Purpose statement
It has been identified that in the construction industry specifically for the construction practitioners, there has been huge reliance on performance metrics that initially are fixed during the onset of the project (Saqib, Farooqui, and Lodi 2008). As a result, there exists misunderstanding or divergent perception between the construction practitioners and the multiple key stakeholders.
Divergence in perception particularly arise from the fact that, majority of clients in construction industry consider a project that is perceived to have failed by practitioners in terms of formalized time, cost and performance goals as success if such project is able to satisfy emergent requirements that were not understood during the initial briefing (Chan 2003).
Arising from this scenario is the fact that many practitioners have failed or have ignored to recognize that client awareness of requirements improves as work on construction projects goes on.
Therefore, the purpose of this research is to employ both primary and secondary research tools in investigating how the understanding of client complexity, emergent requirements, and perceptions of different stakeholders by construction practitioners can result in the success of a construction project.
By understanding client complexity, emergent requirements, and perceptions of different stakeholders in the construction industry, this research will be proposing some of the policy requirements that can be adopted in the construction industry.
It is anticipated that the policy proposals will adequately capture the need requirements of client stakeholders while at the same time inform and equip construction practitioners with the necessary knowledge of the emerging changes in the construction industry.
Research Questions
Research questions arise from the purpose and aim of the research paper as outlined and explained above. Therefore, below are research questions that will guide this research paper.
- How do construction practitioners regard a project to be success or failure?
- How do client stakeholders perceive a project to be successful or failed?
- How adequate can internal conflict among client stakeholders and their reflection on projects help construction practitioners develop solutions that fulfill clients’ needs?
- How appropriate is factors such as understanding client complexity, emergent requirements and perceptions help in project success?
Literature Review
It has become apparent that defining project success in construction industry is posing problems to many people (Saqib, Farooqui, and Lodi, 2008). Numerous views in form of probable definitions have been provided by various researchers of what project success constitute.
For instance, in a research carried out by Lim and Mohamed in 1999, it was identified that construction success is linked to customer stakeholders (cited in Thomson 2011). According to this view, construction success in terms of customer stakeholder’s perspective is premised in macro evaluation of the building’s social acceptance together with the performance.
On their part, practitioner’s view of project success is captured through micro evaluation of key aspects of functional, physical, or sometimes financial objectives (Thomson 2011). Given these divergent perception and definition of project success, it should not be forgotten that in both scenarios of defining success by both stakeholders, success is defined with regard to project’s fulfillment of acceptable criteria.
The above perspectives of defining or explaining project success within the construction industry have been regarded to exhibit shortcomings manifested with lack of explicit and measurable quality criteria and due to lack of objective and universal quality standards (Dewulf and Van Meel 2004 cited in Thomson 2011).
Another researcher, Nicholas (2004) suggested through field research that the traditional definition of project success in construction industry is limited since it only defines project success in terms of budget, schedule, and performance metrics (Chan 2003; Arslan and Kivrak 2008). This definition ignores or bypasses the client stakeholder’s needs that are largely manifested in attitudes, practices, and structures.
More perspectives on the definition of project success have been explored by other numerous researchers. Bryde and Robinson (2005) suggested that definition of project success should dwell much on tangible and cost success factors instead of other factors (cited in Thomson 2011).
At the same time, the researchers noted that this kind of definition should further be ingrained in defining project success by focusing more on satisfying the procuring stakeholder.
This definition was acknowledged and enriched by Murphy in 1974 where through research; it was noted that project success should be built on client satisfaction (cited in Thomson 2011). Moreover, clients appear satisfied when a project manifests characteristics of good coordination of collaborators, avoidance of initial over-optimism and clarity of success factors (Thomson 2011).
On his part, Alvesson et al. (2009) captured the issue of client pluralistic by suggesting that clients are pluralistic, that is to say, clients are “more or less heterogeneous assemblages of actors interests and inclinations whose identity must be constructed so that stakeholders can be identified by solution providers” (cited in Thomson 2011, p.70).
Given this position, it has become clear that solving client complexity is transferable specifically when client ambiguity and complexity s identified.
Nevertheless, other researchers have concluded that there is lack of general consensus as to what exactly can constitute project success in construction industry (Shenhar and Dvir 2001 cited in Thomson 2011). Rodriguez-Repiso et al. (2007) went ahead with research work to observe that emergent views in construction projects should surpass formal goals guiding the project (cited in Thomson 2011).
Overall lesson arising from the findings of the research work by the various researchers is that the success of construction projects is likely not to be realized if projects put more focus on performance and little directed towards people issues.
This can particularly be borrowed from the business perspective of defining project success where success is perceived to depend on the ability of actors to modify goals during the life-time of projects instead of sticking to the onset project goals (Arslan and Kivrak 2008; Thomson 2011).
As a fact project success in construction industry need to fulfill customer satisfaction, which in turn need to be evaluated largely by stakeholders’ value judgment. Such value judgment emanates from stakeholders’ values, experience, expectations, and not success factor targets (Thomson 2011).
Methodology
The purpose of this research project is to investigate and study how the understanding of client complexity, emergent requirements, and perceptions of different stakeholders by construction practitioners can result in the success of construction projects.
This section will explain the research methodology that will be utilized. The methodology for this research project was chosen in correlation with the research questions and purpose of the research (Strauss and Corbin 1998). Target population for the study includes client stakeholders and practitioner stakeholders that are actively involved in construction industry.
Active involvement is defined as the stakeholders who are involved in construction projects and who are impacted by the results of the projects (Babbie 2010). However, the working population for this research project includes those stakeholders from the target population that are prepared to participate in the questionnaire process (Babbie 2010).
Data collection
Data will be collected from both primary and secondary sources, in the case of the primary data questionnaires will be formulated whereby they will be distributed among the target population. Secondary data will be collected from available researches done by various scholars in the topic as literature reviews.
Research design
The research methodology for the proposed research includes a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis: the quantitative section will involve the analysis of the responses obtained from the questionnaire surveys and the qualitative section will be based on a critical analysis of the responses obtained from the direct interviews.
Sampling processes suggests that probability sampling is appropriate for the next step of the research (Babbie 2010). The sampling methodology includes a multistage sampling process that uses a stratified random sample of the firms’ identified in the working population during the research. The use of random sampling is important to avoid bias in the selection process.
The qualitative information obtained from the interview will be organized on a nominal scale and the respondents will be required to rate the extent of what project success or failure is within the construction industry. Moreover, the questionnaires will include an interval scale in an attempt to make the analysis more precise and the respondents will be required to choose between the categories included in the interval scale.
Data Analysis
Data will be analyzed using Microsoft Excel, 2010 version. Various pivot tables will be used for cross tabulation and other statistical data will be accomplished using different Function tools within Excel.
Conclusion
Construction industry is expanding at a faster rate (Arslan and Kivrak 2008) and success in any construction project can no longer be defined from the practitioners’ stand of view.
To avoid conflicts from arising in the definition and perception of key stakeholders as to what constitute project success, there is need to carry out an informed and deep research as to what comprise project from the practitioners and clients stand point of view.
In this way this research project will employ both quantitative and qualitative research tools in investigating and studying how the understanding of client complexity, emergent requirements and perceptions of different stakeholders results in project success in the construction industry.
Given that scant research work exist in this area this particular research will be instrumental in formulation and implementation of key policies n the industry to realize flu satisfaction of clients needs.
Reference List
Arslan, G. and Kivrak, S., 2008. Critical factors to company success in the construction industry. World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology. Web.
Babbie, E. R., 2010. The Practice of Social Research. OH: Cengage Learning. Web.
Chan, A. P., 2003. ‘Framework for measuring success of construction projects’. School of Construction Management and Property, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. Web.
Saqib, M., Farooqui R. U., and Lodi, S. H., 2008. ‘Assessment of critical success factors for construction projects in Pakistan’. Research Paper presented at the First International Conference on Construction in Developing Countries, Karachi, Pakistan. Web.
Strauss, A. L. and Corbin, J. M., 1998. Basics of qualitative research: techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory. NY: SAGE. Web.
Thomson, D., 2011. A pilot study of client complexity, emergent requirements and stakeholder perceptions of project success. Journal of Construction Management and Economics, Vol.29, No.1, pp.69-82. [Attached notes].