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Pinheiro Catalão, Francisco; Cruz, Carlos Oliveira; Miranda Sarmento, Joaquim
doi: 10.1080/01446193.2019.1576915pmid: N/A
AbstractThere is a significant concern about cost deviations and overruns in public projects, particularly by the local governments. The magnitude of expenditure on these infrastructure projects justifies the search for cost deviation reasons, particularly cost overruns. The existing literature also identifies a tendency towards cost overruns in infrastructure projects. However, the analysis of cost overruns determinants has mostly focused on endogenous project characteristics.This research uses a dataset of 4,305 public infrastructure projects, of which 3,338 are local projects, carried out in Portugal between 1980 and 2012. Exogenous determinants (e.g. political, institutional and governance, and economic-related) are also considered in the analysis. An average cost overrun of 19% (9 billion Euros in volume, with a 1 billion Euros overrun) is identified. It is found that central governments incur on an average cost overrun of 23% and local governments on 6%. The analysis confirmed that projects developed by local governments tend to perform better regarding cost deviations and overruns and that exogenous determinants (particularly the political, institutional and governance environment ones) have a strong impact on cost deviations and overruns. These findings on exogenous factors can help local governments to make better management decisions, enhancing governance and institutional frameworks to improve the decision-making process when launching new infrastructure.
Galvin, Peter; Tywoniak, Stephane
doi: 10.1080/01446193.2019.1582789pmid: N/A
AbstractAs construction-oriented public sector agencies have outsourced more and more of their construction-related activities, they have often suffered from an inability to provide appropriate oversight due to degraded capabilities. This had led to calls for these agencies to rebuild capabilities across different technical areas. A firm’s boundary choices—make, buy, ally and dual modes (make and buy simultaneously)—may impact the ability of a firm to maintain and even build new capabilities, and in this article, we seek to investigate the impact that boundary choices have upon rebuilding capabilities and the extent to which organizations may make sub-optimal choices economically to potentially create opportunities for learning and knowledge sharing. Using qualitative data from three project-based public sector organizations managing large construction projects, we observed that neither pure make nor buy decisions assisted significantly in capability building. Dual modes provided firms with some opportunities to build capabilities, but the most successful decisions seemed to occur in respect of using intermediate governance modes such as alliances. We also observed that the boundary choice was just one dimension of the capability building process and suggest organizations require a multi-pronged strategy to rebuild capabilities over time.
Panwar, Abhilasha; Jha, Kumar Neeraj
doi: 10.1080/01446193.2019.1590615pmid: N/A
AbstractIn recent years, the number of stakeholders of construction projects has significantly increased; this has required the simultaneous achievement of competing objectives, such as reductions in the time, cost, resources, and environmental impact of a project, for example. In order to achieve a balance between these objectives, several multiple-objective construction scheduling models have been reported in the literature. However, several challenges have been encountered, due to the complexities of modelling and visualizing more than three objectives simultaneously. Some of these challenges are addressed in this work via the development of a many-objective scheduling model (MOSM) based on a non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm for the simultaneous optimization of four objectives: time, cost, resources and environmental impact. Coordinate plots are used to visualize the trade-offs made between all four of these objectives. A weighted sum is introduced that offers the project team the freedom to choose an optimal solution, depending on the specific priorities of the project, and the practical application of the model is demonstrated via a case study. Our MOSM allows the optimal outcome to be achieved in construction projects with multiple objectives.
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