The number of construction project managers initializing the use of the Last Planner System of Production Control (LPS), an operating system for project management designed to optimize work flow and promote rapid learning, is rapidly increasing, motivated by industry trends and testimonials of its perceived benefits. This study, limited to the building sector, is a systematic literature and testimonial search of the perceived motivations and benefits or challenges for choosing LPS. It substantiates the claims of those perceptions through a structured survey of senior and mid-level managers. Quantitative statistical tools infer that practitioners who use LPS experience more reliable planning, better supply chain integration, and less work flow time. However, managers who directly implement LPS are faced with external resistance from clients and subcontractors, and feel that their organization does not offer the necessary incentives for adopting LPS, indicating a possible clash of paradigms. The cas...

The authors recast the definition of construction as an organization-based planning and placing of information-rich objects and systems in a co-moving patch of space–time. In short, for the purposes of this article, building construction is a deterministic non-periodic flow activated and populated by a temporary virtual organization of stakeholders and exhibits all the characteristics of a complex system. The emergence of unpredictable and sometimes unexpected situations in execution may push this complicated or complex production system into becoming chaotic. Currently, Project Management thought implies that project management (command) is identical to manufacturing (execution), a paradigm that, when applied to construction, implies that construction is predictable. In real life, the number of players and phases creates an environment where a plan may experience high levels of emergent variability in the form of accelerations and decelerations of planned work. This emergence of variability in situ may lead to chaotic conditions. Hence, we find the structural problems inherent in predicting, forecasting a project flow and doing conventional experimentation and case study research: exact building construction is non-repeatable (one of a kind). This article visits the theories of chaos and shows where they may apply in the context of an organization involved in the emergence of self-organization, the act of constructing buildings. In other words, according to Gleick, randomness has its own underlying order. This statement, although apparently contradictory, is the essence and fundamental basis for finding the underlying order in chaotic systems. A case study of tracking building construction production flow is performed and chaos theories are visualized through models. The case study captures both value and waste generation by tracking construction flow through the metrics of budgeted and actual cost and time and its relation to Percent (Promised) Plan Complete and owner payments as well as subcontractors' progress payments. Furthermore, chaos theory, and its peculiar research methodology, showcases how complex and messy construction production could be measured and interpreted. The article argues that chaos theories are a viable scientific approach and provide appropriate tools for understanding building design and construction as production that is by its systemic nature deterministic and non-periodic.

Architects, designers and engineers involved in a sustainable design project often require information and tools beyond energy simulation software. They look for tools to support their decisions and to assess the risk involved in decision making. This research presents a framework that links building performance assessment tools with the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system. The objective is to bridge the gap between architects, engineers, contractors, facility managers and LEED professionals. This work provides information about performance tools that can be used in the different phases of design, construction and operation of a LEED-rated building. This research presents a three-dimensional matrix of the ‘right tool for the right job at the right time’ by linking LEED credits, software tools and phases of building design, construction and operation. Overall, the findings of the research demonstrate that the framework can be used to achieve 21% of total possible LEED 3.0 credits by providing about 36% of total possible points.

Why do Koskela and others argue that the underlying theory of project management (PM) is obsolete? Project management works for the manufacturing industry, and for the construction industry at both the physical production level and the subcontractor level. Stakeholders, including the owner (along with due diligence, and O&M teams), architect (and the design team), general contractor (and its subcontractor team) create, transmit, process, manage and use information. The boundary between information (creation and transmission) and physical production is where PM controls and predicts cost and schedule and where quality controls fail to work as intended. This paper argues that subcontractors give project numbers for the physical part of the project, while general contractors' project numbers are actually a project of projects (those of the subcontractors). The general contractor manages a meta-project (term and definition, as related to building construction, coined by Fernandez-Solis). The meta-project paradigm has significant consequences and is the key to a novel understanding of the general contractor role. Lean construction's percent (or promise) plan complete (PPC) gages the reliability of promises made, is a useful and viable indicator of the quality of the schedule, and serves as a surrogate measure of project flow – how smoothly or chaotically a project runs. The PPC is operationalized as an index that meta-project stakeholders can use to calibrate the reliability of work in progress and provide feedback on the predictability/variability of logistic plans. The methodology of this paper uses conceptual analysis, the metonymic mapping of key concepts from the thermodynamics domain to the construction domain and showcases the concepts through PPC case studies. Information entropy theories are discerned in the PPC reports. In conclusion, scientific information theories, principles and characteristics of flow, in contrast to managerial principles, provide a clearer background for visualizing a novel understanding of the state of the project flow at the meta-project level. It could be argued that this paper is about defining a reference discipline and construed as “construction science viewed through the lens of entropy” but this is not the focus of this paper but the topic of the next.

The study of complexity in construction has raised a valid question: Is construction really complex or just complicated? More importantly, how to test which one is the best characterization of a construction project delivery system? The answer to these questions, as well as that of the title, is developed in this paper through a systematic story: Comprehensive literature search is firstly used to make an embedded conceptual analysis of basic concepts of complex and complicated; behavior analysis of complex systems—as opposite to ordered (complicated) systems; metonymic mapping of complex and complicated system to construction domain, considering construction delivery as a system—product (object), organization and process (social systems), and implying complex theory on the project execution; in the end, discussion of new approaches to construction project delivery management. From the synthesis reasoning of this paper, construction project delivery systems could be considered as complex systems rather than complicated ones. Understanding complexity in construction management is important for two reasons: (1) to visualize how both complicated and complex traits exist in a construction project (object and social systems), and (2) to identify for stakeholders new types of managerial competencies and tools that reflect the understanding of complexity in construction.

BUILDING CONSTRUCTION: Interdisciplinary Capstone Projects Jose L. Fernandez-Solis1,ABSTRACTThe past four fall semester, the COSC 440 Interdisciplinary Capstone classes of graduating constructionscience seniors have been teamed up with COSC 663 Sustainable Construction graduate level classesresponding to a real life RFP. The pat spring capstone class was teamed up with a COSC 489 LeanConstruction undergraduate and graduate level class also responding to a real life RFP. This paper laysout the class structure in all classes and compares the results in terms of grades and quality of theresponses from the faculty and the jurors. All classes were asked to keep track of weekly percent plancomplete (PPC) and interestingly those virtual companies that had the best PPC were the ones that wonthe RFP project.1 Texas A&M University, 3137 TAMU, College Station TX 77843-3137, (979) 458-1058, fax: (979) 862-1572,email: jsolis@tamu.edu