Building designers’ decisions affect long term quality and life cycle cost of buildings. Designers’ decisions are usually latent in nature and hard to detect at the early stage of construction. This research looks at failure mechanisms that caused design-related latent defects and the design parameters that could prevent these defects. A 9-month building survey on 74 buildings found that the three most important design-related failure causes were weather impact, impacts from occupants, and loads and moisture from the wet areas. Insufficient considerations for these failures causes were found to be the key in preventing these defects. The design strategies that could successfully prevent triggering these defects include aligning material performance against adverse weather conditions, preventing impacts from occupants and loads, preventing water leakage, improving specifications and improving design clarity, details, and layout. There are huge amount of standards and codes available internationally, howeve...

Building sector is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions around the globe. Being green, or sustainable, is one pressing issue coming from both internal and external drivers for construction and engineering companies. Green building has experienced rapid growth in the past several years. To assess how green, or sustainable, the building is, several green rating systems have been developed. Among these rating systems, more similarities exist than differences. One noteworthy difference—project management—serves as the motivation behind this investigation. To identify the role of project management that is less related to technology and engineering in developing green building rating systems, this research centers on a comparison between the LEED, the Green Globes, and the BCA Green Mark to obtain an understanding of current practices, and more importantly, to address the significance of project management in achieving green or sustainable construction. The findings suggest that project management adopted in green building construction involves both the practice and the process. Although the practice—mainly represented through the project management body of knowledge—is currently the focus of green building construction, the importance of the process, such as managing people, organizational structure, building commissioning, performance documentation, and so on, cannot be neglected, as can be seen from the evolution of the green rating systems. It is recommended that the construction and engineering companies take project management in terms of both the process and the practice into consideration when fulfilling requirements of being green.

Although enterprise risk management (ERM) has been advocated in the construction industry, its implementation is still plagued with hindrances. The objectives are to identify the critical hindrances to ERM implementation in Chinese construction firms (CCFs) and investigate the interrelationships among these critical hindrances. To achieve the objectives, 36 hindrances were identified through a literature review and a questionnaire survey was performed with 119 respondents. The results indicated that 20 hindrances were deemed critical, among which insufficient resources (e.g., time, money, and people) was ranked top. Additionally, the critical hindrances were categorized into lack of relevant resources and procedures (LRRP), lack of senior-level support and leadership (LSSL), and lack of high-quality data (LHQD). LSSL contributed to LRRP, whereas LRRP resulted in LHQD. The managerial implications drawn from these results can help the management take measures to overcome them. Although this study is focused on CCFs, other firms may use the identified hindrances and follow the method to prepare their customized list of hindrances.

Construction firms have been seen as prime candidates for enterprise risk management (ERM) adoption. The ERM maturity assessment helps them to identify weak areas of their ERM implementation and to prioritize resources to improve these areas. The objectives of this paper are to identify the ERM best practices and important ERM maturity criteria in Chinese construction firms (CCFs) and to develop an ERM maturity model for CCFs. Through an in-depth literature review and a questionnaire survey conducted with 89 professionals, a total of 66 applicable ERM best practices and 16 important maturity criteria were identified and thus used in the proposed model. The results indicated that commitment of the board and senior management; risk identification, analysis, and response; and objective setting were the top three most important criteria. In addition, this model adopts the fuzzy set theory to quantify the implementation levels of the best practices. Moreover, this model was applied in a CCF based in Si...

Construction inspection can take place only during the construction phase of a project. This imposes limitations on what the building inspector can detect, and thus there is often a gap between perceived construction quality and the defects the occupants suffer from later. This research paper looks into the differences among the defects that occurred during construction and 2 to 6 years after initial occupancy and finds that the defects at both periods were very different. Defects found during the occupancy stage are commonly known as latent defects, most of which were rarely found during the construction stage and are thus rarely accounted for by the designers and building developers. This paper confirms the need to look at defects in another way and to establish more effective methods to reduce latent defects.