Identify an organisational problem with a project that your firm has been involved with.

Authors Avatar by mg520 (student)

Company Brief:

The Construction Company I work with deals with medium to large scale projects of varying disciplines. The projects involved are of high degree of Architectural and state of the Art projects requiring high skill and precision. As these projects are time bound involving Government and Political heads, any delay will cost the company large amount of money.

With the ongoing recession and globalization there has been a dramatic shift in the construction industry. The shift is right from senior management to unskilled labor.

During this time the in-house project team has undergone a significant change. There has been senior management roll over and the new management team is dynamic creating a turbulent environment.

Project Brief:

At one instance the company was awarded with a construction project of a high end condominium development. The project was of a high end and there were major stakeholders involved, which had a strict time and cost outlined in the contract. Sensing the priority of the project the company MD (Managing Director) suggested that the project should be closely monitored, managed and constructed by the in house project management team in order to achieve targets of in time project delivery, budget and quality.

The project took off with traditional procurement system and started on the proposed date because of the time bound factor.

Practical Problems encountered Brief:

Within the second quarter of the project since it began, it was evident that the project was not moving forward, i.e. the project schedule had overrun. All well planned schedules that looked good during planning stage were falling apart.

Some of the elements of the project were not finalized and the details were provided at a later date. Hence, there was a short fall during the cost estimation. Where by, the contractor, was expected to ask for a higher mark up in order to take care of the un foreseen contingences. Hence, the client initially transferred all the risk to the contractor.

The very first hurdle encountered on site was foundation issue in relation to ground conditions. The site had varied geology and the proposed foundation design could not be used throughout the substructure. Hence, time was lost during the redesign phase. This change also affected the foundation budget.

Second hurdle encountered was when one of the major stake holders interfered with the main design and insisted in having cantilevered balconies. This change was not effectively communicated to the site team by the design office and as a result the building was built up to that stage with no cantilevered balconies. As a result, the construction was halted and designs were re assessed and modifications were made to the structure to incorporate the balconies.

Join now!

The project was not having stage wise checks and interference of the client with little or perhaps no contractual knowledge was given encouragement without realizing the consequences of such decision. This affected the forward mobility of the project adversely.

Analysis:

The main cause of the practical problems was that the project scope was not defined at the start and hence no proper work schedule was finalized. A clear project scope is the key to project success.

The foundation problem was a foreseeable problem because there was lack of project investigation during project estimation.  This again ...

This is a preview of the whole essay