The novated design and construct (ND&C) contract is one of the increasingly preferred options among developers of large commercial and residential projects across Australia. As a consequence of novation, the design team's obligation to the client gets transferred to the contractor who becomes...

Formal and analytical models that contractors can use to assess and price project risk at the tender stage have proliferated in recent years. However, they are rarely used in practice. Introducing more models would, therefore, not necessarily help. A better understanding is needed of how...

The participation of private capital in public infrastructure investment projects has been sought by many governments who perceive this as a way to overcome budgetary constraints and foster economic growth. For some types of projects, this investment may require government participation in the...

Measurement is a fundamental issue in management research. However, traditional scale development methods have the drawback of mixing researchers' bias with the scale design. Based on Ding et al.'s (2007) exploratory work, a new way to develop semantic differential measurement scales is proposed...

Why does the construction industry remain a predominantly white, male, able-bodied enclave, despite all the efforts made to make it inclusive? What are the real obstacles to women, those from ethnic minority groups, in particular black and Asian, and those with disabilities entering and...

In the highly competitive worldwide construction industry, a slight inaccuracy of estimation can easily cause the loss of a project. Erroneous experience-based cost estimates or allocations of onsite supervisory manpower often offset the profit gained from the project and may even jeopardize the...

A great body of knowledge exists on the theory of auctions and competitive bidding that is of potential relevance to construction contract tendering. Most of this, however, contains assumptions—such as perfect information—that are unlikely to be tenable in practice. The aim, therefore, is to...

Some safety programmes are more effective than others in improving safety performance at the project level. The effectiveness of safety programmes was evaluated by studying 70 construction projects in the Thai construction sector, examining the relationship between their actual status and...

There is a natural tendency for stakeholder groups to try to influence the implementation of construction projects in line with their individual concerns and needs. This presents a challenge for construction project managers in analysing and managing these various concerns and needs in a...

Previous research on building pre-tender cost estimating stresses the importance of giving accurate estimates and minimizing estimating errors. Cost models, especially those mathematical models using mean square error or the like for model training and validation, often treat positive errors...