Project Team Roles For Construction Industry

Key Activities

Discuss about the Project Team Roles for Construction Industry.

The construction industry of Singapore is facing issues of productivity due to rise in costs and lack of manpower availability. Organizations need to find ways to improve productivity such that the costs can be reduced, project period can be reduced, and profitability can be increased. This research aims to identify reasons behind low productivity and come up with recommendations for improvement.

The research would involve some key steps to attain the objectives of the research including:

Survey: Survey would be conducted in order to gain information on what problems or challenges are faced by the construction industry in Singapore, the underlying causes of the declining productivity and possible solutions that some of the flourishing organizations may be using to remain competitive in the environment. An objective survey would be conducted on the respondents who would include the project managers from multiple construction organizations.

Literature Research: Literature review would be a major part of the research and it would involve exploration of secondary data and information sources to understand the challenges of construction industries, causes of productivity decline and possible solutions. Literature review would allow researchers to explore the methods used all over the world as well as those used in the selected region such that the collective lessons may be applied to the case of Singapore to come up with necessary recommendation.

Project Outline Preparation: The research project would need to be conducted in steps and the report would include specific sections. Project outline would explain these steps and define the sections along with the brief of the content to be included. This would serve as a guide for proejct team members to follow it for completion of the project.

Deciding Scope of work:  The scope of work would include specific activities that are to be done in order to achieve the objectives of the project. It would also define the items that are not in the scope of the project.

The project scope includes the following activities:

• Formation of the objectives of the research from the aim
• Study of past literatures on the subject and analysis of the gap in literature
• Brainstorming to come up with a suitable research methodology
• Defining a research methodology and applying sampling techniques to come with sample for primary data collection
• Forming questionnaire for the survey
• Distribution of survey and data collection from the respondents as per the sample size
• Data analysis of the responses obtained from the survey
• Bringing out recommendations through brainstorming for improving the productivity in construction industry
• Preparing the literature review and gap present the gap analysis
• Writing the whole research report including introduction, literature review, methodology, data analysis, conclusions, recommendations, citations and appendices.

The activities that are not included in the scope of this project include:

• Application of the recommendations in the real scenario
• Testing of the recommendations given for construction productivity improvements.

The team consist of 4 members who would be assigned specific work within the research project as reflected below:

Field Researcher: One of the team members would be involved in the research as a field researcher who would take care of the data collection. He would also be responsible for creating, distributing, and collecting data. He would also be responsible for managing the data formats, entry into the SPSS file and setting the variables on the file as per the requirements, and clean the data before data file is finalized for conducting analysis of the file. The questionnaire would actually be prepared using the inputs from the entire team.

Team Roles

Research Report Writer: One of the team members would be responsible for managing the writing of reports starting with the introduction, literature review, methodology, data analysis, conclusions and recommendations. He would be conducting literature review and would decide on the methodology after having brainstorming with the other members of the team.

Data Analyst: One of the team members would be involved in conducting the data analysis of the primary data obtained. He would be performing the analysis using SPSS and would also make interpretations by taking help from the other team members.

Project Manager: One of the team members would be responsible for managing all the activities and ensuring that they are completed on time. He would e responsible for creating the plan, provisioning resources, accessing research reports, reaching out to the respondents and connecting with them for sampling and data collection.

Project plan would go through a set of stages including pre-planning, problem definition, purpose determination, Constraints identification, Literature review, methodology, Data collection, data analysis, data interpretation, conclusions and recommendations. During re-planning, research idea would be formed and a discussion would be followed to take a decision on the investigation of the research. Time frame and budget for the research would also be identified in this stage.

In the problem definition stage, research problems would be identified and each problem could have multiple interpretations and purpose. The purpose is always to achieve a certain goal which in the current research is to understand the causes of the reduction in the productivity of the construction industry in Singapore such that recommendations can be made on their improvement so as to enhance the productivity of companies in Singapore.

There can be several constraints on a research project such as:

• Ethical concerns that can pose limitations on the research methods and their usage. For instance, ethical codes say that the researcher must not have any personal information of the respondents that can later be used for identification.
• Time limitations as per the defined schedule can pose limitations on a project which has to be completed within specified time limits.
• Budget decided for conducting research would also put limitations on how the researches can be conducted, what methods could be used, what ethnographic profiles can be approached and the size of the sample to be used. As this research has limited budget which only allows for data collection, a survey methodology is being used.
• The manpower involved here is only 4 members and thus, there are constraints on where to travel. Thus, most survey respondents would be approached using internet through an online survey to reduce the travel needs.

The project plan for the research study would contain the following details:

Aims & Objectives: Aim of this project is to explore the challenges faced by construction industry of Singapore causing their productivity to decline and identify methods that can be used for improving productivity. Major objectives of this research include:

• Compare productivity levels of construction companies of Singapore with companies in other countries that are flourishing well in construction
• Identify reasons that cause productivity decline in the construction companies of Singapore.
• Come up with recommendations for improvements in the productivity of the construction companies in Singapore through adoption and modifications in government policies.

Background and Significance: The construction industry of Singapore is currently hit by some major problems because of which productivity of the industry has been reduced. Major drivers for this decline in productivity include rising costs and inability to find the right workforce due to tight worker quota policy of the Singapore government. Growing cost of labour and lack of the talent has cause major productivity declines in the industry. The objective of these companies remains reduction of cost, improvement of profitability, and reduces the period of construction project completion. The industry has been booming for past few years and the boom is still continuing with more and more requirements for construction getting generated.

Project Plan

There is a very strong demand for infrastructure project and public housing construction projects. This demand is going to increase over the coming 5 years. In such a situation, managing the costs would be a bug challenge for the company. The problems are further aggregated because of the fact that the economy is open to investments and entries of companies from different countries that may be capable of handling the cost factor in a better manner causing threat to the domestic construction organizations. Further, living standards of the people in the country have improved and thus, the construction outcome by the companies based in Singapore may not be considered very great by them and they would open up more to the external investments (Baguley, 2008).

On the labour side, construction work appears to be dirty and dangerous which makes it difficult to attract a large amount of labour force which may be needed by the construction companies in Singapore. Thus, in order to get the workforce, organizations woo them with higher salaries which increase the cost of the project thereby causing limitations of the number of labour that can be hurried.

Considering these challenges, it is important that the challenges and possible solutions of the construction industry productivity are explored by a thorough research which would be helpful in improving the conditions of the industry. Thus, this report would explore the methods used for managing construction project, identify ways costs can be reduced and productivity can be improved for construction industry (Cisneros, 2013).

Preliminary Studies:  There have been past studies done on the subject that have revealed some useful insights. Some major issues have been identified in these studies such as unattractiveness of the industry when considering career development and impacts of the government policy on the construction workers migrating from foreign companies. Preliminary studies have also revealed some important highlights that would be useful for the current study such a (Cleland and Kerzner, 2012):

• Most unemployment in Singapore is found in construction and manufacturing industry
• Construction industry plays a significant role in national and economic development
• In 2014, the employment rate of the industry has fallen down by 0.5% while production has reduced by 0.4% in the same time
• There are several construction companies that have winded up since 2007 including 51construction companies that have filed for liquidation.
• Okun’s law can be applied to the case of construction companies in Singapore which explains the situation of the country. Because of low wage rates that are not comfortable with construction workers, the demand is more than labour supply causing labour shortage. This shortage can actually be eliminated if wages are increased but the industry fails to increase this supply of money and thus, supply curve is very inelastic. The law says that if there is one percent increase in unemployment, there is a 2% fall in production.
• As the country is developed and has good level of people who can afford education and thus, there would be more students who can afford to take higher education and thus, would look for a white collar job. Thus, there would be less number of people in the country who would be willing to join lower salaried or lower status jobs like those in construction. They are further discouraged due to the danger involved in construction work (Margerison and McCann, 2012).
• Some research methods have been used by researchers for such studies like:
  • Labour and productivity impacts are studied and correlation analysis has been conducted by researchers and a positive correlation was found between the two.
  • Most researchers have followed positivism approach to deciding research methodology and thus, have relied on the facts about people instead of their subjective perspectives.
  • Most studied are explorative and there is no approach made for establishing any theory related to the subject
  • Some articles have taken a deductive approach to research and tested hypothesis to understand if there is a significant relationship between labour engagement and productivity.
  • Researchers conducted in past have used both primary data from people and secondary data such as financial or economic reports (Saynisch, 2013).

There are two hypotheses that are formed in this research and would be tested in the research:

Hypothesis 1: Singaporean will not work as construction workers even if the wage increases to S$2,000 per month. 

Hypothesis 2: Singaporean has never voiced its displeasure against hard labour workers that have never taken their job away. It is the government’s wrong perception to appease Singaporean by reducing the number of foreign workers in Singapore.

There are two questionnaires one containing variables related to career and job satisfaction and second questionnaire researching dependent variables derived from the past studies on the subject. A sample size of 217 is taken for each questionnaire and the researchers anticipate a response rate of 80%. A stratified random sampling method has been used for deciding the people to be surveyed.

The data collected in this research would be quantitatively tested using Chi-Square tests which would be used for testing the association between two major variables including type of job and job prospects. Mutually exclusive variables are less than 5 in numbers. In the second questionnaire, a likert scale would be used for understanding perceptions of people on jobs.

The project would follow a stepwise procedure for completing the research considering it as a project. In this process, certain milestone dates would be planned which would determine accomplishments such that the researchers would have to complete all the tasks as planned before specific milestones. These milestones include:

Milestone Deliverables	Milestone Dates	Milestone activities
Aims and objectives refined	5th Feb 2017	Refine aims Define research objectives
Introduction	10th Feb 2017	Write introduction containing research background, research aims and objectives, research significance and research paper outline
Literature review	25th Mar 2017	Study previous research papers Identify gaps in literature Write literature review section for the research report.
Research Methodology	5th Apr 2017	Identify research design Identify research methods for data collection and data analysis Develop a research methodology Write a research methodology Develop hypothesis statement
Questionnaire 1 & 2 preparation	10th Apr 2017	Develop questionnaire one Test questionnaire with peers Develop questionnaire two Test questionnaire with peers Finalize questionnaire and prepare consent letter for respondents
Research Data Collection	1st May 2017	Create online survey for online users Take survey questionnaire print outs for other respondents Approach respondents with questionnaire Fill the responses Collect data and feed into SPSS Conduct statistical analysis on the collected data. Define variables in SPSS
Data Analysis	13th May 2017	Decide analysis methods to be used for analysis of the statistical data considering two hypothesis Conduct tests on SPSS for hypothesis testing
Data Interpretation	15th May 2017	Based on the data analysis results, make some interpretations that help achieve research objectives
Write conclusions & recommendations	20th May 2017	Write the summary of research including key findings and come up with recommendations based on the interpretations.
Finalise the report	25th May 2017	Proofread and edit the report for formats, grammar, and citations. This would mark the completion of the project and would be followed by submission.

The specific milestone activities have to be achieved before the milestones to mark it as complete. If there are delays in the completion during a milestone, the time may be adjusted in other milestones or an additional time may be taken from the tutor or adjustments may be made in responsibilities such that team members share them to achieve the results faster. 

References

Baguley, P. (2008). Project management. [New York]: McGraw-Hill.

Cisneros, S. (2013). The house on Mango Street. New York: Vintage Books.

Cleland, D. and Kerzner, H. (2012). Engineering team management. Malabar, Fla.: R.E. Krieger Pub. Co.

Margerison, C. and McCann, D. (2012). Team management. London: Mercury.

Saynisch, M. (2013). Project management system for a large international project. International Journal of Project Management, 1(2), pp.115-121.