COORDINATING SPECIALISTS:
A Challenge to the Quality Transformation
of Construction Project Organizations

Professor Iris D. Tommelein, Principal Investigator
Professor Glenn Ballard, Co-Investigator
IDC, Industrial Partner

Funded by a 3-year grant from the National Science Foundation, starting in 1998.

Project Summary

Long before Adam Smith, the division of labor has been recognized as a source of quality and productivity improvement. Just as long-lived is the recognition that those benefits do not occur automatically. Plato's Republic is founded on the division of labor among specialists. The bulk of the treatise then explores how to reap its advantages without destroying that very society itself. Today, we regard the coordination of specialists as a fundamental task of management. Coordination problems are posed within the boundaries of a single organization. The quality movement in particular has highlighted the necessity and importance of streamlining processes that cut across departmental or divisional boundaries within a company. Some of the most successful achievements have been made in product-development processes, which exemplify such intra-company coordination issues. Management also has the task of coordinating specialists drawn from multiple, independent companies, each of them performing a specialized role in an extended change of value production. This is common in the construction industry, where management's challenge is to coordinate the work of specialist contractors that participate in a 'one-off' project team with no a priori guarantees for future collaboration.

Construction projects offer a challenging combination of product-development and value-chain production problems. Designing and building a biotechnology laboratory, a microelectronics plant, or a chemical processing facility is itself a component in the product-development process of the client organization for whom the facility is being constructed. At the same time, its construction involves a chain of specialists extending from architects and engineers who develop the design and specifications, to suppliers of the equipment and materials specified, and finally to the numerous specialty trade contractors who install that equipment and those materials. The transformation to quality of such complex, temporary organizations poses interesting and challenging difficulties, and can serve as a testing ground for the development of concepts and techniques having a broader range of application. Learning how to transform construction project organizations into quality organizations will also have implications for coordination issues located within single organizations and within more enduring value chains.

The PI conducted a preliminary survey of specialty contractors to describe and understand the current state of practice of coordinating the specialty contractors that erect structural steel, install piping, build power and instrumentation systems, etc. She found a broad range of specialty contractor selection, planning, management, and contracting practices, with an equally broad range of impacts on their ability to perform as regards safety, product quality, schedule, and cost. Findings were presented at the fall '97 seminar of the Northern California Construction Institute (NCCI) and sparked quite some interest (Tommelein and Ballard 97). NCCI, an industrial partner in this research, has agreed to continue to make its members accessible for further investigation of current and improved practices.

The focus of the proposed research is on conducting a series of Plan-Do-Study-Act experimentation cycles in which Industrial Design Corporation (IDC), our primary industrial partner, has agreed to participate. IDC is a major design/build firm, with offices and projects throughout the world. It has an outstanding record of accomplishments in the microelectronics industry. The UC Berkeley/IDC team will jointly explore alternative processes for specialty-contractor selection, preparation, and incentives, and conduct field experiments on actual construction project sites. The team will test alternative processes for production planning and control during project execution, with the intent of facilitating both resolution of problems and exploitation of opportunities for quality improvements. Techniques from lean manufacturing will be adapted and tested for applicability in construction. The implications of changes in the coordination of production on construction contracts will be investigated, though the research focus is on managing the production process, not on managing contracts.

Concurrently with this on-site experimentation, discrete-event simulation computer models will be developed to mimic industry practices and allow for further experimentation with alternative production control techniques. Such models have proven to be beneficially applicable to articulating and evaluating a broad range of processes through representation of material and information flows, human organizational structures, and resource interactions across multiple entities and activities. The resulting models will document current as well as best practices and help in formalizing and disseminating research findings. This research is expected to produce models for specialty-contractor management that can be applied not only to assist the transformation to quality of construction project organizations, but will be applicable to the broader range of issues that emerge from the enduring task of coordinating specialists.

Publications

| Prof. Iris D. Tommelein | CE&M Program | U.C. Berkeley |

CE&M Program / IDT / 8 February 2001