Implementing value management as a decision-making tool in the design stages of design and build construction projects : a methodology for improved cost optimization

Value Management (VM) has been proven to provide a structured framework, together with other supporting tools and techniques, that facilitate effective decision-making in many types of projects, thus achieving ‘best value’ for clients. One of the major success factors of VM in achieving better project objectives for clients is through the provision of beneficial input by multi-disciplinary team members being involved in critical decision-making discussions during the early stage of construction projects. This paper describes a doctoral research proposal based on the application of VM in design and build construction projects, especially focusing on the design stage. The research aims to study the effects of implementing VM in design and build construction projects, in particular how well the methodology addresses issues related to cost overruns resulting from poor coordination and overlooking of critical constructability issues amongst team members in construction projects in Malaysia. It is proposed that through contractors’ early involvement during the design stage, combined with the use of the VM methodology, particularly as a decision-making tool, better optimization of construction cost can be achieved, thus promoting more efficient and effective constructability. The main methods used in this research involve a thorough literature study, semi-structured interviews, and a survey of major stakeholders, a detailed case study and a VM workshop and focus group discussions involving construction professionals in order to explore and possibly develop a framework and a specific methodology for the facilitating successful application of VM within design and build construction projects.

Evaluation of risk factors leading to cost overrun in delivery of highway construction projects

Accurate owner budget estimates are critical to the initial decision-to-build process for highway construction projects. However, transportation projects have historically experienced significant construction cost overruns from the time the decision to build has been taken by the owner. This paper addresses the problem of why highway projects overrun their predicted costs. It identifies the owner risk variables that contribute to significant cost overrun and then uses factor analysis, expert elicitation, and the nominal group technique to establish groups of importance ranked owner risks. Stepwise multivariate regression analysis is also used to investigate any correlation of the percentage of cost overrun with risks, together with attributes such as highway project type, indexed cost, geographics location, and project delivery method. The research results indicate a correlation between the reciprocal of project budgets size and percentage cost overrun. This can be useful for owners in determining more realistic decision-to-build highway budget estimates by taking into account the economies of scale associated with larger projects.

Implications for the design of a digital stethoscope for anaesthetic preadmission consultations

Background This research addresses the development of a digital stethoscope for use with a telehealth communications network to allow doctors to examine patients remotely (a digital telehealth stethoscope). A telehealth stethoscope would allow remote auscultation of patients who do not live near a major hospital. Travelling from remote areas to major hospitals is expensive for patients and a telehealth stethoscope could result in significant cost savings. Using a stethoscope requires great skill. To design a telehealth stethoscope that meets doctors’ expectations, the use of existing stethoscopes in clinical contexts must be examined. Method Observations were conducted of 30 anaesthetic preadmission consultations. The observations were video- taped. Interaction between doctor, patient and non-human elements in the consultation were “coded” to transform the video into data. The data were analysed to reveal essential aspects of the interactions. Results The analysis has shown that the doctor controls the interaction during auscultation. The conduct of auscultation draws heavily on the doctor’s tacit knowledge, allowing the doctor to treat the acoustic stethoscope as infrastructure – that is, the stethoscope sinks into the background and becomes completely transparent in use. Conclusion Two important, and related, implications for the design of a telehealth stethoscope have arisen from this research. First, as a telehealth stethoscope will be a shared device, doctors will not be able to make use of their existing expertise in using their own stethoscopes. Very simply, a telehealth stethoscope will sound different to a doctor’s own stethoscope. Second, the collaborative interaction required to use a telehealth stethoscope will have to be invented and refined. A telehealth stethoscope will need to be carefully designed to address these issues and result in successful use. This research challenges the concept of a telehealth stethoscope by raising questions about the ease and confidence with which doctors could use such a device.

Lift@Weimar : sustainable interaction with food, technology, and the city (Workshop)

This workshop explores innovative approaches to understanding and cultivating sustainable food culture in urban environments via human-computer-interaction (HCI) design and ubiquitous technologies. We perceive the city as an intersecting network of people, place, and technology in constant transformation. Our 2009 OZCHI workshop, Hungry 24/7? HCI Design for Sustainable Food Culture, opened a new space for discussion on this intersection amongst researchers and practitioners from diverse backgrounds including academia, government, industry, and non-for-profit organisations. Building on the past success, this new instalment of the workshop series takes a more refined view on mobile human-food interaction and the role of interactive media in engaging citizens to cultivate more sustainable everyday human-food interactions on the go. Interactive media in this sense is distributed, pervasive, and embedded in the city as a network. The workshop addresses environmental, health, and social domains of sustainability by bringing together insights across disciplines to discuss conceptual and design approaches in orchestrating mobility and interaction of people and food in the city as a network of people, place, technology, and food.

Bayesian multinomial logit: Theory and route choice example

Statisticians along with other scientists have made significant computational advances that enable the estimation of formerly complex statistical models. The Bayesian inference framework combined with Markov chain Monte Carlo estimation methods such as the Gibbs sampler enable the estimation of discrete choice models such as the multinomial logit (MNL) model. MNL models are frequently applied in transportation research to model choice outcomes such as mode, destination, or route choices or to model categorical outcomes such as crash outcomes. Recent developments allow for the modification of the potentially limiting assumptions of MNL such as the independence from irrelevant alternatives (IIA) property. However, relatively little transportation-related research has focused on Bayesian MNL models, the tractability of which is of great value to researchers and practitioners alike. This paper addresses MNL model specification issues in the Bayesian framework, such as the value of including prior information on parameters, allowing for nonlinear covariate effects, and extensions to random parameter models, so changing the usual limiting IIA assumption. This paper also provides an example that demonstrates, using route-choice data, the considerable potential of the Bayesian MNL approach with many transportation applications. This paper then concludes with a discussion of the pros and cons of this Bayesian approach and identifies when its application is worthwhile

Business Process Model Merging : An Approach to Business Process Consolidation

This paper addresses the problem of constructing consolidated business process models out of collections of process models that share common fragments. The paper considers the construction of unions of multiple models (called merged models) as well as intersections (called digests). Merged models are intended for analysts who wish to create a model that subsumes a collection of process models - typically representing variants of the same underlying process - with the aim of replacing the variants with the merged model. Digests, on the other hand, are intended for analysts who wish to identify the most recurring fragments across a collection of process models, so that they can focus their efforts on optimizing these fragments. The paper presents an algorithm for computing merged models and an algorithm for extracting digests from a merged model. The merging and digest extraction algorithms have been implemented and tested against collections of process models taken from multiple application domains. The tests show that the merging algorithm produces compact models and scales up to process models containing hundreds of nodes. Furthermore, a case study conducted in a large insurance company has demonstrated the usefulness of the merging and digest extraction operators in a practical setting.

Client recommendations for financial incentives on construction projects

Purpose: To provide recommendations for construction clients who design and implement financial incentive mechanisms (FIMs) on projects. ---------- Methodology: Four large Australian building projects commissioned by government clients under managing contractor contracts and completed between 2001 and 2005 were examined to explore the ‘drivers’ that promoted motivation toward financial incentive goals. The results were triangulated across data sources, projects and stakeholder types. ---------- Findings: FIM design should incorporate: 1. flexibility to modify goals and measurement procedures over time, 2. multiple goals covering different project areas, 3. distribution of rewards across all the key organizations contributing to team performance (e.g. potentially not just the contractor, but the subcontractors and consultants) and a reward amount sufficient to be valued by potential recipients. FIM benefits are maximized through the following complementary procurement initiatives: 4. equitable contract risk allocation, 5. early contractor involvement in design, 6. value-driven tender selection, 7. relationship workshops, and 8. future work opportunities.---------- Research Limitations: This paper provides practical recommendations to industry and hence does not emphasize theoretical aspects.---------- Practical Implications: The uptake of these recommendations is likely to increase the impact of FIMs on motivation and improve project and industry outcomes. Although the study focuses on government clients of building projects, all the recommendations would seem to apply equally to private-sector clients and to non-building projects.---------- Originality: In order to improve motivation and reward high performance, clients are increasingly using FIM in their construction contracts. Despite the rising use of financial incentives, there is a lack of comprehensive construction-specific knowledge available to help clients maximize outcomes. The study addresses this gap in the literature.

A study of the generalised max–min fair rate allocation for ABR control in ATM

In the rate-based flow control for ATM Available Bit Rate service, fairness is an important requirement, i.e. each flow should be allocated a fair share of the available bandwidth in the network. Max–min fairness, which is widely adopted in ATM, is appropriate only when the minimum cell rates (MCRs) of the flows are zero or neglected. Generalised max–min (GMM) fairness extends the principle of the max–min fairness to accommodate MCR. In this paper, we will discuss the formulation of the GMM fair rate allocation, propose a centralised algorithm, analyse its bottleneck structure and develop an efficient distributed explicit rate allocation algorithm to achieve the GMM fairness in an ATM network. The study in this paper addresses certain theoretical and practical issues of the GMM fair rate allocation.

Output feedback control of discrete-time systems in networked environments

This correspondence paper addresses the problem of output feedback stabilization of control systems in networked environments with quality-of-service (QoS) constraints. The problem is investigated in discrete-time state space using Lyapunov’s stability theory and the linear inequality matrix technique. A new discrete-time modeling approach is developed to describe a networked control system (NCS) with parameter uncertainties and nonideal network QoS. It integrates a network-induced delay, packet dropout, and other network behaviors into a unified framework. With this modeling, an improved stability condition, which is dependent on the lower and upper bounds of the equivalent network-induced delay, is established for the NCS with norm-bounded parameter uncertainties. It is further extended for the output feedback stabilization of the NCS with nonideal QoS. Numerical examples are given to demonstrate the main results of the theoretical development.

Settlement geography of African refugee communities in Southeast Queensland : an analysis of residential distribution and secondary migration

Before 2001, most Africans immigrating to Australia were white South Africans and Zimbabweans who arrived as economic and family-reunion migrants (Cox, Cooper & Adepoju, 1999). Black African communities are a more recent addition to the Australian landscape, with most entering Australia as refugees after 2001. African refugees are a particularly disadvantaged immigrant group, which the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs (in the Community Relations Commission of New South Wales, 2006) suggests require high levels of settlement support (p.23). Decision makers and settlement service providers need to have settlement data on the communities so that they can be effective in planning, budgeting and delivering support where it is most needed. Settlement data are also useful for determining the challenges that these communities face in trying to establish themselves in resettlement. There has been no verification of existing secondary data sources, however, or previous formal study of African refugee settlement geography in Southeast Queensland. This research addresses the knowledge gap by using a mixed-method approach to identify and describe the distribution and population size of eight African communities in Southeast Queensland, examine secondary migration patterns in these communities and assess the relationship between these geographic features and housing, a critical factor in successful settlement. Significant discrepancies exist between the primary data gathered in the study and existing secondary data relating to population size and distribution of the communities. Results also reveal a tension between the socio-cultural forces and the housing and economic imperatives driving secondary migration in the communities, and a general lack of engagement by African refugees with structured support networks. These findings have a wide range of implications for policy and for groups that provide settlement support to these communities.

Out of touch? On the lack of emotional support over the mobile phone

Findings from an Australian case study of adult women expose general, light and basic use of mobile phones. Participants used their mobile phone mainly for coordination and to a lesser extent for practicing intrinsic interactions motivated by emotional support purposes. This paper focuses on social and emotional support over the mobile phone. Though crucial to individuals, emotional support seems to be a neglected area of research among mobile communication studies, all the more so when focusing on adult women. This study addresses this literature gap. The empirical findings are based on a case study of 26 women over 35 years of age residing in one coastal Australian town. The research design included a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. This paper examines the communication methods adult women use for social and emotional support, and analyses reasons and social implications of this limited intrinsic communication use pattern over the mobile phone.

Autoethnography in vocational psychology : wearing your class on your sleeve

This paper addresses reflective practice in research and practice and takes the issue of consciousness of social class in vocational psychology as a working example. It is argued that the discipline’s appreciation of social class can be advanced through application of the qualitative research method autoethnography. Excerpts from an autoethnographic study are used to explore the method’s potential. This reflexive research method is presented as a potential vehicle to improve vocational psychologists’ own class consciousness, and to concomitantly enhance their capacity to grasp social class within their own spheres of research and practice. It is recommended that autoethnography be used for research, training, and professional development for vocational psychologists.

Concept building

In this world of continuous change, there’s probably one certainty: more change lies ahead. Our students will encounter challenges and opportunities that we can’t even imagine. How do we prepare our students as future citizens for the challenges of the 21st century? One of the most influential public intellectuals of our time, Howard Gardner, suggests that in the future individuals will depend to a great extent on the capacity to synthesise large amounts of information. ‘They will need to be able to gather together information from disparate sources and put it together in ways that work for themselves and can be communicated to other persons’(Gardner 2008, p. xiii). One of the first steps in ‘putting things together’ so they ‘work’ in the mind is ‘to group objects and events together on the basis of some similarity between them’ (Lee & das Gupta 1995, p. 116). When we do this and give them a collective name, we are conceptualising. Apart from helping to save our sanity by simplifying the vast amounts of data we encounter every day, concepts help us to understand and gain meaning from what we experience. Concepts are essential for synthesising information and they also help us to communicate with others. Put simply, concepts serve as building blocks for knowledge, understanding and communication. This chapter addresses the importance of teaching and learning about concepts and conceptual development in studies of society and environment. It proceeds as follows: first, it considers how individuals use concepts, and, second, it explores the characteristics of concepts; the third section presents a discussion of approaches that might be adopted by teachers intending to help their students build concepts in the classroom.

Is providing micro-credit social responsible?

Micro-finance, which includes micro-credit as one it its services, has become big business with a range of models – from those that operate on a strictly business basis to those who come from a philanthropic base, through Non Government organisations (NGOs). Success is often measured by the numbers involved and the repayment rates – which are very high, largely because of the lending models used. The purpose of this paper is to identify whether the means used to deliver micro-credit services to the poor are socially responsible. This paper will explore the range of models currently used and propose a model that addresses some of the social responsibility issues that appear to plague delivery. The model is being developed in Beira, the second largest city in Mozambique. Mozambique exhibits many of the characteristics found in other African countries, so the model, if successful, may have implications for other poor African nations.

Entertainment industries at university : designing a curriculum

Universities have not traditionally trained students to work as producers in the entertainment industries. This key entertainment role involves balancing creativity, business and legal skills in order to generate and run entertainment projects. Queensland University of Technology has recently introduced a program to train students for these jobs. The program is interdisciplinary, drawing on expertise from the Creative Industries, Law and Business faculties. This Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL) article details the course learning outcomes developed from extensive industry and academic consultation, and addresses some of the difficulties involved in developing such an interdisciplinary teaching program.