Corporate growth is understandably one of the hottest topics among researchers in management and managers themselves. Nonetheless, research in the sector of professional service firms, especially engineering consulting firms, has not yet led to a deeper understanding of how growth in this...

The volume of construction output fluctuates in response to changes in demand and supply conditions. Due to the multiple linkages that the construction industry has with other economic sectors and the entire economy, the output shock is propagated through the economic system and reflected in...

Previous research suggests that the construction industry is characterized by (1) particular complexity factors owing to industry specific uncertainties and interdependences, and (2) inefficiency of operations. The aim of this study was to analyse the operations and behaviour of firms as a means...

Disputes are inevitable in construction projects. Skills in dispute resolution should be part of the toolkit of any practitioner in a managerial position. Dispute resolution procedures such as litigation, arbitration, mediation, dispute adviser and negotiation are widely practised. However,...

Consultants' fees and technical submissions in two-envelope fee tendering are usually converted to scores. The fee scores and technical (quality) scores are then multiplied by predetermined weightings and aggregated. To preserve the desired influence of the predetermined weightings, the fee...

Neural network cost models have been developed using data collected from nearly 300 building projects. Data were collected from predominantly primary sources using real-life data contained in project files, with some data obtained from the Building Cost Information Service, supplemented with...

This paper considers the generic processes involved in structuring an information technology (IT) training strategy to meet a construction organization's business strategy. It identifies and discusses how generic and specific IT training needs can be affected by the availability and priority of...

The main purposes of this study are to incorporate both the project delay penalty and early completion bonus into the objective function of the resource-constrained multi-project scheduling problem with discounted cash flows (RCMPSP-DCF) and to develop an efficient heuristic search scheduling...