PM 610 Storyboard
PM 610 Storyboard
PM 610 Storyboard
However, the importance of projects in terms of time, quality, and price to define a project is
increasingly being questioned. The argument is that project quality should be assessed as
part of a larger project management process. The recommends that while assessing a
project, more elements should be examined, and the standard triangle should be enlarged.
As a result, additional influencing elements should be considered while evaluating the
Sydney Opera House project management. The project is successful at the product level in
terms of both product and project. The Sydney Opera House was a national landmark
structure that had an architectural and cultural impact across the world. The structure has
become the most popular cultural institution, with two million visitors each year.
Based on this research findings and literature reviews, a framework for enhancing innovation
practices in the construction industry has been devised. The framework is intended to be an
effective management tool for supporting innovation in construction project management. It
gives the potential for the managers to enhance their project management process and
enables them to cope with change and development in external and internal environments.
To stimulate innovation in the construction project management, successful innovation
requires more than just putting creative people in a room and hoping they come up with
valuable new products or processes. So as shown in Fig. 1, the framework rests on a
foundation of five building blocks comprise four main levels for achieving innovation in
construction project management. These levels are explained below.
Level 1: Strategic Management
At the beginning, each organization, whatever its business, should focus on specific areas of
interest by making strategic management. Without a clear vision, mission and objectives,
organizations cannot survive in such turbulent environment, especially the construction
environment. Therefore, organizations need to have a clear vision that embraces innovation
besides defining the optimal desired future state to what an organization is focused on
achieving in five, ten, or more years.
After doing strategic management and before looking for enhancing the external
environment, top managers must provide an internal innovative work environment for all
individuals within the organization. Research has shown that enhancing construction
industry requires a good internal atmosphere and innovative culture to motivate staff to think
in creative ways and requires also open minded and supportive top management to create
the challenge and push people to think out of the box. Moreover, for continuous
improvement, organizations need to provide reward and recognition for creative work
besides offering the sufficient requirements and training for their employees.
Radical innovation is a completely new method that leads to significant changes in the
industry's nature. Due of the dangerous nature of the building sector, contractors mostly use
incremental and modular improvements. Like industrial innovation, the construction life cycle
begins with Opportunity Exploration, where market trends, client insights, technological
trends, data analytics, regulatory, and competition information all play a part in directing
projects or contractors to examine new technologies. If a new tool, technique, or technology
is found, we examine project needs to see whether the innovation is appropriate, useable,
and scalable, as well as conduct user experience testing to determine whether the project
team will be able to maintain utilizing the innovation.
Sydney Opera House was a disastrous construction project due to its poor way of
project management. However, if we apply the modern project management skills and tools
such as PMBoK to the project in the past, it might have been taken a shorter time to
complete the project and within budget without comprising the quality. The process groups
and knowledge areas in the PMBoK can assist in the project management of the Sydney
Opera House because of its modern project management tool. Such as firstly initiation of the
project phase, by establishing the initiation team it helps and assist in carrying out the project
initiation activities, such as maybe finding a better site location for the project and this leads
to establishing the project initiation plan, which is to define the activities required to organize
the team while working to define the goals and scope of project. Besides that, establishing
management procedures is also crucial, as it concerned with the developing team
communication and reporting procedures, job assignments and roles, project change
procedure, and how the funding and billing will be handled. By properly managing all these,
it helps with the smoother running of the project, as all parties are aware of what to do at the
early stage/phase. Secondly with planning of the project, to describe the alternatives and
feasibility. It should be properly planned on the allocation of tasks and resources. With this
comes project human resource management, which if have planned properly, the roles and
responsibilities of each party would be clear, and they would hold a greater responsibility in
their work given rather than just blaming on other people or having communication problems
internally. By properly planning, the last-minute changes from two theatres to four would not
have been an issue too.
By properly planning also means to have project scope management knowledge, the
team should have properly mentioned the scope of works pre-construction stage to be done
in the project to avoid any unnecessary changes such as the example above, where two
theatres were changed to four. Next would be the execution of the project, by executing the
baseline project plan and keep the project on schedule and assure quality of project
deliverables. This is an important process especially for the case of Sydney Opera House as
most the major problems be it financial or materials issues happens during construction
stage. The team should have proper communications and proper monitoring on the project
progress against the baseline project plan. The team should be able to manage the changes
to the baseline project plan with proper project management. In the case of the Sydney
Opera House, there wasn’t any close monitoring of the project progress, and it resulted in
the change of the roof. By properly monitoring the baseline project plan, the team would
have been prepared to apply and imply any methods or alternatives to any last-minute
changes and this would drastically reduce the time and any delays. In addition to this, it also
beneficial to have some knowledge in project risk management, as it 11 would help in
predicting any risk or changes in the future and how to handle them onset rather than solving
it after the problem had occur, as also because the Sydney Opera House is an almost
impossible task due to its unique design in the past. Unlike the Sydney Opera House,
successful projects emphasized not only the risk identified throughout the project lifecycle
but also were quantified, prioritized, and effect risk response were developed (Taylor, 2009).
Communication of the project status can be applied in the executing stage too, as it
tells the team about the financial status and time needed, this will either help in cutting cost
from other future elements if needed to stay within budget or hire more workers during that
stage to complete the works even faster. Which the knowledge area of project
communication management plays a big part. It is to ensure timely and appropriate planning,
collection, creation, distribution, storage, retrieval, management, control, monitoring, and the
ultimate disposition of project information. With proper cost and communication
management, Utzon and other parties such as the team and client would have better
communication and probably would result in him not being forced in resigning, and this
would result in Utzon still designing the Opera House instead of the three other engineers
and delays and cost would have dramatically been reduced. As because of the three other
engineering needed to redesign the rest of the Opera House with what has been done, it
costs them a huge amount and delay to the project, which supposedly to be completed
within 4 years and AUS $7 million. Proper project quality management knowledge is
important too as this would help in the planning of the materials or specifications needed for
the column to support the heavy roofing. The team should have planned on the specification
of the column before the construction from analysing and also enough proper research. By
having this area of knowledge, the team with enough research and analysis should have
known that the current materials for the construction of column is insufficient to support the
roofing.
Not to forget, with all that has mentioned above, it adds on to also the knowledge
area of project time management, having to have proper time management from initiating to
executing, from making sure the right amount of resources is allocated and proper
preparation for any future risk would definitely help in reducing the delay in the case of
Sydney Opera House, from initially what has planned, 4 years to be done but ended up 14
years. Beside all of that, is to also imply the knowledge area of project stakeholder
management. The processes required to identify all people or organizations impacted by the
project, analysing stakeholder expectations and impact on the project, and developing
appropriate management strategies for effectively engaging stakeholders in project
decisions and execution. In the case of Sydney Opera House, one of the main problems was
also from the delay payments of the government which is also a stakeholder. By proper
engagement and strategies, the delay would probably been much lesser. Finally, the closing
phase of a project. Applying this process is to make sure that all project documentation
should be finalized so that the final review of the project can be conducted. By conducting
the post project review for Sydney Opera House, it makes sure that the same mistakes that
has happened in the project would not be repeated in other similar projects. It also let all
parties learn from their mistakes and improve from there on.