Editorial

Citation

McCaffer, R. (2003), "Editorial", Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management, Vol. 10 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/ecam.2003.28610eaa.001

Editorial

This issue of ECAM brings us a wide ranging collection of papers. The one that interested me most was Hughes' review of the new RIBA plan of work, but this is probably because part of my time is taken up with representing the client in project management and we use the existing RIBA plan and everyone seems to understand it. Again, ECAM has an international authorship, three papers are from the UK, one from Thailand, one from Singapore and one from Hawaii, and if my memory is sound, this is the first Hawaiian contribution we have welcomed to the ECAM family of authors. The 11 authors are distributed as two single authored papers, three with two authors and one with three authors. What has not appeared this time are multi-institutional, multi-country authored papers, so this trend is temporarily halted.

The papers in this edition

Hughes compares the old RIBA Plan of Work with the new Plan of Work published in 2000. The RIBA Plan of Work is arguably the most widely used document by clients and their consultants in setting up and controlling projects. Hughes uses organisational matrices to examine the characteristics of the two plans. The new plan is much more concerned about information flows but the new plan has a startling absence of control. Overall it offers an updated replacement. It remains unapproved by the RIBA.

Singh argues that accelerating work schedules is achieved by overtime and over manning and these are left to the judgement of the local foreman. However, Singh argues that overtime and over manning can be objectively designed and sets out a sample problem to illustrate this.

Xioa and Proverbs continue the series of comparative contractor performance that have been published from time to time from the University of Wolverhampton. This paper is based on a hypothetical construction project, i.e. a high rise concrete framed building, and compares overall contractor performance in Japan, the UK and the USA and the data collected by questionnaire survey. Overall construction performance was measured in terms of cost, time, quality and sustainable development. The results of the analysis are presented.

Ruthankoon and Ogunlana study the motivation of Thai construction engineers and foremen using Herzberg's two-factor theory. The authors compare their results to Herzberg's. "Responsibility", "advancement", "possibility of growth" and "supervision" contribute to job satisfaction. "Working conditions", "job security", "safety" and "organisations" contribute to job dissatisfaction. The authors' conclusion is that Herzberg's theory is not entirely applicable to Thai construction. So I presume they will develop the Thai modified version of Herzberg's theory.

Cuervo and Pheng examine what location factors are the most significant for Singaporean transnational construction corporations engaged in foreign value-added construction-relaxed activities in their major international construction market. The three factors that the authors identify as the most significant are first, the host government's attitudes, policies and regulatory framework; second, the social, political, cultural and geographic factors; and third, the cost of doing business.

Fernie, Green and Weller take us through an interesting discourse on "requirements management". This paper is really about searching for a definition of "requirements management" and the need for it and the role the practioners play.

Ron McCaffer