CONSTRUCTION MANAGEMENT
Welcome to the lectures of the course on construction management. The first part of the course consists of series of theoretical lectures providing you with knowledge of the theories within project, design and construction management. The second part consists of a series of interviews with some of the main stakeholders participating in one form or the other in any building process. This will allow you to understand some of the challenges of the building industry the theory is set up to address. Furthermore, it is very likely that you will get employed in an organization like the ones presented here, and will have to cooperate the people representing the other. Reflecting on the role of each stakeholder and understanding their interplay with the others is there for beneficial for preparing you for your future career.
The exam in this course will follow EvaluationFormat Lb. Please consult the semester description for a thorough description.
LECTURES
Lene Faber
Lecture 1
Lecture 2
Lecture 3
Lecture 4
Lecture 5
Lecture 6
Lecture 7
Lecture 8
Lecture 9
Lecture 10
CASES
As you might have gotten a sense of at this point, the building industry as a whole is complicated and diverse – many different stakeholders is involved in each building project. In this series of cases you are presented for some of them in the form of interviews with key persons in organizations presenting some of them.
The idea is to invite you into parts of the “engine room” of the building industry. To reach a successful end result in terms of technique, aesthetics or functionality of projects that you will be involved throughout you future career, you must learn to operate within the organizational structure of the building industry – it is the necessary craft so to speak. You will meet all these stakeholders, and your ability to communicate with them and to operate within the framework of each assignment will be a prerequisite for success.
Eventually you will probably be employed within one of these types of organizations, and this series of cases might therefor also be a help in your career planning – where could you see yourself in a few years?
The Building Owner
The building owner is the one whose needs and specifications appears to define the task. However, it might be somewhat more complicated. The building owner might build to fulfill the needs, wishes and specifications of future users, institutions, investors, tenants and so on. Furthermore, the building owner has to adapt to planning on a local as well as a regional level as well as building regulations in general, representing the demands and standards of society. The task for consultants, contractors, engineers and architects will depend one which type of building owner they work for and which end user the building owner is working for or plan to rent or sell the building to. In this section, you will be presented for three types of building owners and the different types of assignments and ways of organizing the the building process.
The Developer
In this section you will be presented for a private developer in the form of the local Aalborg company Calum. A developer is basically a company who most often buys land, builds, and sells the building to investors or users. Often an agreement has been made with the buyer before this process starts, meaning that the end user is known.
Public organizations
Defining a building program for a public institution and managing the process which is demanded by EU-legislation about competitions and pre-qualification of which groups of architects, engineers and sometimes contractors or special consultants that will be invited to participate in completions is a complicated matter. Often the function of the building is complicated demanding extensive registrations of functions and user demands. The building is often also part of an overall strategy e.g. public schools have to fit into the overall strategy and policy for education. Also the budget will be part of an overall economic planning.
This is a process that demands a high degree of expertise, and public organization therefor often hire a consulting company specialized in handling this process. As these consulting firms therefor has the biggest overview of the diversity and complexity of public building assignments, you a presented to these kinds of tasks in the form of the consultants from Bascon, a company which besides being a combined engineering and architectural firm, also is a leading company in Denmark in these kinds of services.
Public housing
A lot of housing I Denmark is built as public housing. These kind of housing is taken care of by independent non-profit organizations but with public economic support. Also public supported building is regulated by various laws ensuring everything from proper competition in the choice of engineers, architects and contractors to maximum sizes of apartments and the type and amount of housing being build.
These organizations is often very big and professional, having extensive competencies in how to manage the process, extensive knowledge about housing and housing related challenges like social problems as well as having a well-developed strategy. In this interview you will meet two key persons from the public building organization Himmerland. Himmerland builds for about 1 billion kroner a year, and is thereby on of the biggest separate building owners in the region.
The authorities
The authorities set the framework for any building assignment, and the roughly speaking does that in to steps. Planning will almost always define the use and to some extent also the architectonic framework for any building beforehand. Sometimes a dialogue with the authorities concerning the planning framework most typically at the levels of district/local planning will be needed in connection with a given specific building assignment. After the building has been designed it has to be approved in relationship to building regulations. This process often includes a dialogue during the design process, as several rules might demand a interpretation in relationship to the concrete building task.
In this interview you will meet a representative from the municipality of Aalborg, explaining about both sides of the task of the authorities, the dialogue between the authorities and the other stakeholders, and how planning relates to the overall political strategy of the municipality.
The engineer
The building design traditionally is carried out as cooperation between the architect and the engineer. The relationship between architect and engineer will vary according to how the overall building task is organized. In assignments which are based on competitions, the one will often be a subcontractor to the other, meaning that the one will be the overall manager and the one with contact to the building owner. Whether the engineer or the architect is the main consultant will depend on the character of the assignment. If the client is e.g. a developer or turn-key contractor, both engineer and architect might have contracts directly with the client. The content of the assignment might often depend very much on the client and the overall organization of the building task. Just as the company’s overall understanding and organization of the task will be the key to its success, understanding the character of the task as well as one’s own role and possibilities within this organization will often be the key to a successful and personally fulfilling result.
The big engineering company
The engineering company Rambøl is one of the biggest engineering companies in Scandinavia. In this interview you will meet a manger of a local office, explaining how assignments is organized within the company, what is the big issues in terms of managing the assignments, the types of clients they work for and how the organization might chance in order to adapt to the various assignments.
The middle sized engineering company
The engineering company Søren Jensen is a middle-sized engineering company who is specialized first and foremost in assignments within health care buildings and other engineering assignments with high requirements.
The Architect
An architectural company can be placed within various positions within the overall organization of a building assignment e.g. the architect can work directly for the building owner, be a sub-contractor to either a turn-key contractor or an engineer, or can be the main consultant, having the engineer as a sub-contractor. The architects job, and consequently the job of the single employee within the office, will vary greatly depending on the type of assignment both I terms of size, organization and type of client. Those if employed at an architect’s office your job might vary significantly depending on which type of clients the office is working for or if it is specialized for a special type of client and/or type of assignment e.g. health care.
The large architectural office
AART Architects, founded in 2000, now has over 300 employees in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, and is one of Scandinavia’s largest architectural firms. The rapid growth and success of the firm is due to a conscious attitude to what the architect’s job is, which is reflected in a very specific strategy. For the same reason, the company has not chosen, like several other large architectural firms, to merge with engineering firms.
Sustainability, DGNB, LCA and LCC. The hybrid engineering and architectural company
The increased demand for sustainable architecture has meant an increased need for an integrated design process, where engineering and architectural disciplines together with specialized competencies within, for example, DGNB, LCA and LCC are integrated into the design process right from the beginning. This has meant that several hybrid companies are beginning to emerge. In this case, we are talking with Trine Bindslev Tree from Rambøll, a large engineering company which now has its own rather large architectural division, in order to practice integrated design.
The smaller locally based architectural office
The architectural office Hovaldt is a local firm, located outside Vrå in Northern Jutland, in the former studio of the painter Poul Ancher Bech. The office is owned and founded by Dorte Hovaldt, a former student from Architecture and Design at Aalborg University. As a local firm, the offices relation to its clients is often close and long lasting, in contrast offices, which generally get their assignments through competitions in which the relationship to the client is non-existent in the first phases of the project and might only last for a single project.