David Greenwood

• MA, MSc., Ph.D
• Managing Director at Northumbria University

Purpose Past studies on project-related failures (PRF) have focused more on developing criteria for measuring project success and failure and achieving project outputs without addressing the impact of PRF on team members. Therefore, this study aims to focus on reviewing the impact of PRF on team members and the support offered by leaders. Design/m...

Learning from past project failures presents opportunities for firms working within the construction sector to ‘build back wiser’ because, if lessons from these experiences are absorbed, they offer benefits such as mitigation against future failures, and enable the development of resilient project teams. However, instead of using sector-wide perspe...

A special issue of Buildings (ISSN 2075-5309). This special issue belongs to the section "Construction Management, and Computers & Digitization". https://www.mdpi.com/journal/buildings/special_issues/1LWF18R62G

In their 2011 paper titled “Managing the Institutional Context for Projects” Morris and Geraldi raised the importance of the institutional context in the management of projects. Building on that, this study proposes the conceptualisation and understanding of project-related failure and success through an institutional perspective. This is based on...

Purpose In his 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation”, Maslow suggested the “Hierarchy of Needs” as a classification system that described the stimuli for human behaviour. Presently, project behaviour research, which inspired this work, encourages undertaking research on behavioural aspects within and across organisational and project settings....

Project Based Organisations (PBOs) are established to optimise project delivery. Unfortunately, as failures still occur on projects, the anticipated performance enhancements of PBOs have not lived up to expectations to date. This has led to interest in how PBOs learn from project-related failures. Regrettably, despite considerable financial investm...

Projects are distinctive, time-constrained, undertakings meant to generate benefits for their stakeholders. They are delivered by Project-based organisations (PBOs) whose various actors separately consider achievement in relation to a project's outputs, outcomes, and impact. For example, contracting organisations typically consider projects that fa...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to facilitate the process of monitoring construction projects. Classic practice for construction progress tracking relies on paper reports, which entails a serious amount of manual data collection as well as the effort of imagining the actual progress from the paperwork. Design/methodology/approach This paper...

Purpose British construction industry KPI data collected over recent years shows a trend in projects exceeding their time schedules. In 2013, the UK government set a target for projects timeframes to reduce by 50%. Proposed interventions included more rapid project delivery processes, and consistent improvements to construction delivery prediction...

This article highlights the advantages of Lean Construction (‘Lean') and Building Information Modelling ('BIM') that have received much attention. Individually, each promises transformative and beneficial effects on the construction process, prompting researchers to consider the possibility of synergies between the two. An early example is the hypo...

Building Information Modelling (BIM) is deemed to be one of the prominent tools of the 21st century in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) Industry, helping construction stakeholders, and clients to gain value from their projects. Moreover, information and lessons learned during a construction project, i.e. what can be called “proj...

Purpose: Global competition and advances in technology have enhanced the growing trend of virtual teams in order to execute business strategies. Thus, understanding the competencies needed for virtual leadership effectiveness is essential and vital to organisational success. The purpose of this study is to identify and analyse the required competen...

Accurate and valid data is essential during the development of building projects and throughout the use phase of buildings. This study proposes a framework to help owners and facility managers in: (a) defining the requirements for asset management tasks in a structured way; (b) validating project and asset data against the established requirements;...

The term ‘sustainable construction’ is used to highlight the responsibility of the construction industry in attaining sustainable development (SD). With the increasing necessity for resource efficiency and climate change adaptation, there is a need for construction key stakeholders to implement sustainable principles and practices in construction p...

The term äóÖsustainable constructionäó» is used to highlight the responsibility of the construction industry in attaining sustainable development (SD). With the increasing necessity for resource efficiency and climate change adaptation, there is a need for construction key stakeholders to implement sustainable principles and practices in constructi...

The well-known (probably the best known) objective of the UK Government’s 2011 Construction Strategy was for ‘fully collaborative 3D BIM (with all project and asset information, documentation and data being electronic) as a minimum by 2016’. This deadline has passed, and a number of reports have followed, commenting on how far the construction indu...

The construction industry faces many challenges, amongst them the marginalisation of knowledge capture in the early stages of construction projects, which leads to a loss of intellectual assets. Construction organisations seek to create value for their potential and existing clients. Building information modelling (BIM) technology has been identifi...

The construction industry is still facing major challenges, such as inefficient communication among construction stakeholders due to its fragmented nature. On the other hand, construction organisations want to create value for their potential and existing client, and seek to be more competitive in the construction market. For this reason, knowledge...

Occupants’ window opening behavior influences the performance of buildings significantly. Good window use can provide a comfortable indoor environment with a minimum energy use, while improper window use may result in bad indoor environment and may also waste great energy. This paper identifies improper window uses in an existing building in Beijin...

More than half of construction projects exceed their agreed time schedules. Attempts to remedy this have been monitored over a number of years in the UK using standard industry KPI measurement data. The aim of this research was to investigate how contracting organisations have adapted their existing construction planning practices by using 4D BIM t...

Occupant behaviour has an important role in both the environmental performance and energy performance of buildings, which has been thoroughly demonstrated in the past several decades. Based on a review work, some research gaps have been identified in the area of occupants’ ventilation behaviour and to answer those gaps a field study was carried out...

Abstract Low energy building retrofit presents important opportunities for reducing of greenhouse gas emissions in the environment. It has been considered as one of the key approaches to achieving sustainable development in construction industry. Nevertheless, such retrofitting proves challenging due to the fact that the industry has ignored the ne...

Background: This research is an on-going PhD research with primary aim of developing a decision support system for key stakeholders in sustainable retrofitted building projects. Delivering sustainable retrofitted building project in the construction industry has been characterised with a lot challenges especially with the inability of the key stake...

Abstract Today’s construction environment is described as turbulent due to economic crisis, global competition and rapid changes in industry structure. For most of the construction organisations to stay afloat within th is environment, organisations have to find new ways to create value for their pot ential and existing clients. Building informat...

The growing interest in and awareness of sustainable development in the last decade has been remarkable. The construction industry has taken the centre stage in driving sustainable development through sustainable construction due to its impacts in the society. It has been argued that 80% target reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in the United Ki...

This paper highlights the significance of knowledge management in construction activities, focusing particularly in the case of sustainable retrofitted building projects. It has been acknowledged that the industry has a poor attitude to project learning and the capture of project knowledge. Knowledge has been recognised as a most valuable asset in...

This paper describes a proposed strategy of exploring the role of knowledge management (KM) in delivering retrofitted building projects. This is based on an ongoing PhD project whose primary objective is to develop a decision support system (DSS) for the key stakeholders in sustainable building retrofits. A brief review of sustainable construction...

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to examine the feasibility of using 3D simulation transfer processes to streamline the environmental assessment of buildings that have been designed digitally using building information modelling (BIM). The case study presented relates to a competition (“Build Qatar Live”) in which one of the winning team’s ob...

The 2013 UK Government construction strategy, presented at its 'Construction Summit' set targets for 50% faster project delivery and reductions in the overall delivery time for new build and refurbished assets. Despite the best efforts of constructors, who have considerable in house experience, skills and knowledge in project delivery, more than ha...

This research investigates the issues of authoring reusable BIM components that can be delivered across multiple platforms. A key constraint in the uptake of Building Information Modelling BIM technology is interoperability, the ability to accurately and automatically share and exchange data. This has been addressed by the creation of a system of s...

One of the main problematical operational issues in construction projects is the co-ordination of building materials to arrive on site at the right time, in the right quantities, and at an acceptable quality level. The number and details of the steps involved in the material life cycle indicate the complex nature of the process and the potential fo...

A particular problem for productivity in engineering construction projects is poor front-end planning, in particular, the lack of attention to resource-loaded schedules. In such projects, resources are highly specific and constrained, resulting in conflicts that can compromise planned durations and add cost. There are many techniques available for...

The assumption that forms of collaborative working (for example, partnering) can have a substantial beneficial impact on project performance underlies many of the proposed reform agendas in the UK construction sector. The majority of supporting evidence is, however, either anecdotal or limited to individual cases. This shortfall is addressed and as...

This paper draws attention to project trade-offs significance in project management and critically reviews the current state of the knowledge on the elements to be considered and the methods to resolve trade-off decisions. Traditionally the elements to be considered in trade-offs are mainly limited to time and cost and to some extent quality or ris...

For over fifty years, dating back to the Simon report (1944), commentators on the UK construction industry have been lamenting the design-construct divorce and advocating earlier contractor involvement to produce, inter alia, better quality buildings. Since 2003 a substantial part of the addition to the value of UK new building stock has been in th...

Building designs in the UK are currently checked manually against a frequently changing and increasingly complex set of building regulations. This is a major task for both designers and enforcers, often leading to ambiguity, inconsistency in assessments and delays in the overall construction process. Technical developments in Building Information M...

The concept of the 'project triangle', together with the related issues of project tradeoffs and project success factors are frequently discussed together in project management (PM) literature. However, these discussions rarely examine their interconnection critically. As a consequence, the models that are developed from and for these concepts are...

To reduce the substantial contribution of the built environment to energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions, the new ‘Part L: Conservation of Fuel and Power’ of the Building Regulations for England and Wales came into force in April, 2006. As a result, the design of all new-build and refurbished buildings must comply with ‘Target Carbon Emis...

This paper presents results from the first stage of an analysis of the use of virtual reality (VR) within the building industries of strategically selected countries, namely, China, Sweden, the UK and the US. The aims of the research are to assess VR usage and its benefits within the building industries of these countries and to identify perceived...

The UK construction skills shortage problem is well documented. To alleviate this, there is a political shift of emphasis in the UK towards employers and employees/ learners playing a more proactive role in skills development. This research seeks to examine the mechanisms that can enable such a demand-led skills development system to materialise. A...

Purpose Failure is encountered regularly within project‐based industries and there has been research for decades into this phenomenon. Much of it has considered the failure of projects in terms of the classic project progress issues such as time, cost and quality. Using cases from two major industries the authors aim to develop a different understa...

The need for a major re-think of our approach to project management education has begun to emerge. This re-think is being driven by the growing dominance of project management as the model of delivery in many private and public sector organisation across a wide range of requirements and its limited success in achieving all objectives. Sustained dev...

In the UK, new building regulations ('Part L2006') to reduce energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions within the built environment came into force in 2006. It is now mandatory that all new built and refurbished buildings demonstrate compliance with 'Target Carbon Emissions Rates' in the design phase. This has prompted some interesting questi...

Design-and-build delivery has become a significant alternative to the more traditional design-bid-build, though the level of its use varies from country to country. This research investigates the entry strategies of foreign contractors in China and their use of design-and-build, set against the country’s evolving construction project procurement re...

A ten year study of construction performance has resulted in a conclusion that construction industry performance problems are being caused by the client's delivery process. The hypothesis of the research is that the client has created a price-based environment which forces a technical solution to construction issues. Modeling has been created which...

Performance based procurement is a relatively new directive for contractor selection. Performance based procurement considers the value of the contractor's services in the award of the contract in addition to the submitted bid price. This study utilizes a statistical analysis comparing the abilities of the performance based and price based (lump su...

The normal way of dealing with damages for delay in a construction contract is to use a Liquidated and Ascertained Damages clause. Such clauses specify a preset sum to be due to the client for every day, week or month by which the contractor fails to meet the works completion date. However, the greater part of the value of construction work is actu...

With spending for computer and networking hardware, software and services projected to exceed a trillion pounds by 2005, the potential for greater involvement of ICT in the creation of organisation wealth could be hampered by an extremely high rate of project failures in ICT industry projects. The poor performance of the ICT industry in deploying i...

Strategic planning processes are oriented towards the selection of objectives and product/market choices by senior management. From this viewpoint strategic planning provides a mechanism for setting and reviewing objectives, focusing on choices of long-term significance, identifying strategic options, allocating resources, and achieving corporate-w...

The recent publication of the U.K. Society of Construction Law's protocol for dealing with delay claims has finally provided a good opportunity to make progress with a continuing difficulty that besets most substantial construction projects. The protocol makes recommendations on the issues that arise when delay claims must be managed. A report of r...

In developing techniques for monitoring the costs associated with different procurement routes, the central task is disentangling the various project costs incurred by organizations taking part in construction projects. While all firms are familiar with the need to analyse their own costs, it is unusual to apply the same kind of analysis to project...

Recent publicity shows a shift in the attitude of main contractors to subcontract procurement in the UK. However, a survey of the specialist contractors' sector shows that this impression should be approached with caution: the typical contractor - subcontractor relationship is still traditional, cost-driven, and potentially adversarial. Nevertheles...

In construction scheduling, conflicts can arise when activities require common resources that are available only in limited quantities. To overcome this, while retaining minimum project durations, mathematical techniques have been developed for allocating resources. However, these produce a ‘hard’ inflexible approach to resource-constrained schedul...

Many firms in the construction industry claim to be working in a 'partnering' or even in an 'integrated' way. It is, however, very difficult to verify these claims with the tools currently available. The purpose of this study was to collect and refine existing work on integrative and collaborative working, so as to develop a quick and simple tool t...

Due to the increased level of uncertainty of construction market and the variety of building functions, the practitioners in construction need work together more closely, which means a higher degree of collaborative working is often necessary. There is evidence that higher degree of collaborative working can produce more successful projects, but th...

There are two ways to analyze the problem of construction nonperformance (not on time, not meeting the quality expectations of the owner, and not having cost increase change orders). The first is a project-specific approach, which assumes that the problems are being caused by the uniqueness of each project. This approach stresses: finding solutions...

The cost of tendering in the construction industry is widely suspected to be excessive, but there is little robust empirical evidence to demonstrate this. It also seems that innovative working practices may reduce the costs of undertaking construction projects and the consequent improvement in relationships should increase overall value for money....