Securing clients' objectives throughout construction project lifecycles

The main motivation to pursue with this special issue entitled “Securing clients’ objectives throughout construction project lifecycles” was triggered by widespread issues faced by the project teams to meet client’s project aspirations at delivery. Organizational decisions to commission a project are typically manifestations of client’s organizational needs and strategic visions, drivers and priorities. Despite formal and informal procedures to continuously articulate and define client’s organizational values and original vision to the project team, there are numerous forces that adversely influence the development of the project over its lifecycle (Chan et al., 2003; Tang and Shen, 2013). Thus, the ultimate outcome is that clients will have to utilize the finished product as an asset to receive the economic return (Short et al., 2011). There are, however, cases where the finished products of the construction projects deviates from the client’s vision and hence failed to bring optimum benefit to the clients. Some of the well-known examples falling into the category of “White Elephants” are: the Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport (Sri Lanka), the South China Mall (China), Tel Aviv Central Bus Station (Israel), the Saint Helena Airport (the British Overseas Territory) and the City of Culture of Galicia (Spain). Thus, one of the four explicit objectives set for this special issue is to share research that reviews and develops tools/techniques aiming at capturing and fully understanding client’s needs and requirements, project vision and organizational strategies. Another objective of this special issue is to showcase examples on how the project supply chain could work more collaboratively with a client organization, particularly empowering the client to reconcile visions and be proactively involved in the planning, design and construction stages. There are occasions that some clients are reluctant even to provide a comprehensive (or adequate) project brief to the project team (Yu et al., 2010). This makes it more challenging for the supply chain to understand the multidimensional nature of client’s organizational objectives. In projects where multiple stakeholders with diverse organizational objectives are clustered around the client from the demand side (e.g. end users and investors in a major infrastructure project), the supply chain faces enormous challenges to meet multiple (sometimes conflicting) needs and secure multi-layered relationships, while also considering external stakeholders, such as governments, general public or environmentalists who have a power to slow-down or terminate the project in the worst case scenario (Lia et al., 2013). Eskom’s Kusile and Ingagula Power Stations in South Africa are two of the examples that have been subjected to similar challenges in their project lifecycles. The third objective is to gather evidence of how construction projects could be procured in ways that assist better understanding of the impact of decision making during the design and construction toward the project vision and fulfillment of client’s organizational strategies during the asset management stages. The supply chain may not have the full understanding of the client’s enterprise level, scope and priorities, whilst repercussions from project decisions on client’s organizational strategies can only be appreciated after understanding the complex micro and macro environmental systems in which they operate expertise (Tillmann et al., 2010). Exacerbating this challenge, industry characteristics will typically divert the attention of the supply chain toward other priorities in a project delivery. For example, market competitiveness forces the supply chain to implement unprecedented design and construction solutions and the presence of other constraints (such as fixed deadlines and budgetary constraints) does not provide the project team an adequate opportunity to model the risk of unverified technology and processes along with an established methodology. An example of such incidents is the Wembley Stadium Project delivery in the UK (Moore, 2009, 2011). As the fourth objective, the special issue brings research that focuses on appropriate frameworks, techniques and/or tools for facilitating smooth information transfer between project and asset management teams. The transitional interactions between project development and asset management should occur over the lifecycle of the project and not be limited to the period of handover. In addition to defining organizational information requirements (i.e. data and information required to secure client’s organizational objectives), holistic and integrated management of the project is needed to systematically evaluate supply chain’s information exchange plans (Harty and Whyte, 2010). Standardized procedures are defined in some countries, such as the UK, to assist the construction industry for managing (i.e. verification, sharing, publishing and archiving) such information in a more structured manner (e.g. PAS 1192: Parts 2, 3 and 4) (British Standard Institute, 2013; British Standard Institute, 2014). Nevertheless, ad hoc exchange mechanisms are widely practiced (Le and Jeong, 2016) and there is a knowledge gap to be filled regarding the mechanics and efficiency of recent developments.