Fast-Track Construction

2.1.1 Overview

Under a rapidly changing business environment, the construction industry has been seeking a new method to ensure a faster and more economic project delivery. Among the various efforts to meet this change, the fast-tracking delivery method has received considerable attention over the last decade (Pena-Mora and Park, 2001), and come success stories of fast-tracking with its time saving feature have been demonstrated in the literature (Huovila et al., 1994; Williams, 1995). Followings are advantages and shortcomings of fast-tracking summarized from the literature.

Advantages:

1. Time and Cost Saving: The iterations for design and construction can be decreased. Effective fast-tracking in a construction project can help reduce the duration and lower the cost wasted in the traditional precise iterative design and construction process (Tighe, 1991; Williams, 1995; Pena-Mora and Li, 2001).

2. Rapid Response: A detailed, up-to-the-minute plan and planning tool are essential to make rational decisions about changes in projects (Williams, 1995).

Since a fast-tracking project can never afford to stop, it must continue on through the entire duration of the project. As the information gets better and better the schedule shod get more and more detailed. The importance and the impact of things changed daily must be aware clearly in the fast-tracking

projects.

Shortcomings:

1. Interfaces conflicts enhanced: Due to the parallel implementation of several design and construction activities, an unplanned event can generate a ripple effect on related activities depending on their relationships. The interface conflicts may increase easily (Tighe, 1991, Williams, 1995; Pena-Mora and Li, 2001; Pena-Mora and Park, 2001; Lee et al., 2003).

2. Difficulty in integration of architects, engineers and constructors.

3. Complexity for change orders.

Generally, despite its promise of speed, fast-tracking also has greater potential to impact the project development process than the traditional more sequential method (Pena-Mora and Park, 2001). In reality, this popular method often results in unexpected costs and does not necessarily lead to the expected shorter project duration (Fazio et al., 1988). In the literature, these potential risks are usually attributed to the increased level of uncertainty (Russel and Ranasinghe, 1991). As a result, research efforts on fast-tracking have mainly focused on uncertainty reduction. In dealing with uncertainty, concurrent engineering (CE) was proposed as a proper solution to decrease the uncertainty through the collaboration of interdependent tasks.

2.1.2 Concurrent Engineering in Construction

The concept of CE was initially proposed as a means to minimize product development time (Winner et al., 1988; Evans, 1988). Several definitions of CE have emerged in literature (Pena-Mora et al., 2000):

z Concurrent Engineering is a ‘systematic approach to the integrated, concurrent design of products and their related processes.’ This approach is intended to cause the developers, from the outset, to consider all elements of the product life cycle form conception through disposal (Winner et al., 1988; Pena-Mora et al., 2000).

z Concurrent Engineering is a ‘goal-directed effort, where ownership is assigned mutually among the entire group on the total job to be completed, not just pieces of it, with the understanding that the team is empowered to make major design decisions along the way.’ This definition is more suited to a virtual CE enterprise with geographically separated designers as it highlights the importance of distributed teams (Winner et al., 1988; Turing, 1992).

The above definitions indicate that most of the basic principles of CE, revolve around the notions of teamwork affinity and shared knowledge leveraging. CE strives to create teams of people working together to create global optima in their efforts (Huthwaite, 1994;

Pena-Mora et al., 2000). Cooperative work teams remain the single most important component of CE (Prasad, 1996; Maliniak, 1991). There are four primary elements to cooperative work teams (Pena-Mora et al., 2000):

z Communication involves the exchange of information, events and activities in any CE effort. Effective communication is a necessary, thought not a sufficient condition to meaningful collaboration.

z Co-location involves dealing with the infrastructure to provide seamless communication among distributed designers and engineers.

z Coordination involves control of the workflow and communication process,

allowing efficient control mechanisms to coordinate group effort. Coordination involves managing the various interdependencies between activities and events in any CE effort.

z Collaboration describes the process of sustainable value creation that creates a shared understanding in the CE effort.

Applying the CE concept, several applications have been implemented in the construction industry. Table 2.1 lists the researches applied CE to design, construction, and fast-track construction projects.

Jaafari (1997) investigated concurrent construction (CC) and its potential application in life cycle management of capital projects. The result showed that concurrent construction has the potential to reform the project processes in a foundation way, and an overall framework for the implementation of the concept has been presented also.

Lu and Cai (2000) used Petri Nets as tools for topological and computational process illustration to develop a systematic representation and managing method of the collaborative design process. Based on Lu and Cai’s framework, the process conflict detection can be done, so that managing design conflict becomes a coordination infrastructure among design stakeholders to support the refinement of the design process.

Pena-Mora (2000) developed the CAIRO (Collaborative Agent Interaction and synchronization) system for distributed design conferences. CAIRO aids the concurrent engineering effort by relaxing the synchronization and agent synchronization, so that members within the design team can be collaborated together to complete the assigned design goal. Besides, Pena-Mora (2001) combined axiomatic design, CE, the graphical evaluation and review technique, and system dynamics to propose a dynamic planning and

control methodology (DPM) for discovering the potential problems of fast-tracking projects. The CE in Pena-Mora’s study was used to decrease the uncertainty caused by the overlapping of design and construction tasks. Following the DPM, Lee (2003) addressed a quality and change management framework to scheme out the dynamic project model for elaborating on how iterative cycles interact with project performance and makes the project uncertain and complex.

Table 2.1 CE Applications in Construction

No. Research Topic CE application in construction industry 1 Concurrent Construction

and Life Cycle Project Management (Jaafari, 1997)

This paper investigated concurrent construction and its potential application in life cycle management of capital projects. It has been shown that concurrent construction has the potential to reform the project processes in a foundation way, and an overall framework for the implementation of the concept has been presented also.

2 A Collaborative Design Process Model in the Sociotechnical Engineering Design Framework (Lu and Cai, 2001)

By using Petri Nets as a process illustration tool, the design conflict detection and handling method was addressed to manage the collaborative design process.

3 CAIRO: a Concurrent

Engineering Meeting Environment for Virtual Design Teams (Pena-Mora et al., 2000)

The research described CAIRO system, a distributed conferencing architecture for managing designers and engineers in a distributed design meeting. CAIRO aids the concurrent engineering effort by relaxing the synchronization and agent synchronization.

4 Dynamic Planning for

Fast-Tracking Building Construction Projects (Pena-Mora and Li, 2001)

Focusing on the planning and implementation of fast-tracking on design/build projects, this research developed a dynamic planning and control methodology by combining the application of the concepts of axiomatic design (AD), concurrent engineering (CE), the graphical evaluation and review technique (GERT), and system dynamics (SD).

Consequently, with a rigorous and systemized methodology, potential problems can be addressed early before construction.

5 Quality and Change Management Framework for Concurrent Design and Construction (Lee et al., 2003)

A quality and change management framework was presented to capture iterative cycles and their impacts during actual execution, particularly, in concurrent design and construction.

Based on this framework, the schema of dynamic project model allows users to elaborate on how iterative cycles interact with project performance and makes the project uncertain and complex.

6 Assessing the Suitability of Current Briefing Practices in Construction within a Concurrent Engineering Framework (Kamara et al., 2001)

This paper focused on the briefing stage in the construction process, which is used to elicit and represent client objectives for a project, and assesses whether the current practice of briefing is adequate within a CE framework for design and construction. Using case studies and an industry survey, the current process of briefing was assessed against pre-defined requirements for briefing within a CE context.

Summarily, to implement the fast-track construction, CE provides a collaborative

framework to decrease the uncertainty of the overlapping phases. Based on this discovering, this research applies the collaboration mechanism to facilitate the fast-tracking in D/B projects.