General contractor?s project of projects ? a meta-project: understanding the new paradigm and its implications through the lens of entropy

摘要

Why do Koskela and others argue that the underlying theory of project management (PM)is obsolete?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 theconstruction 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 andtransmission) and physical production is where PM controls and predicts cost and scheduleand where quality controls fail to work as intended. This paper argues that subcontractorsgive project numbers for the physical part of the project, while general contractors?projectnumbers are actually aproject of projects(those of the subcontractors). The generalcontractor manages a meta-project (term and definition, as related to building construction,coined by Fernandez-Solis). The meta-project paradigm has significant consequences and isthe 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 andviable indicator of the quality of the schedule, and serves as a surrogate measure of projectflow?how smoothly or chaotically a project runs. The PPC is operationalized as an indexthat meta-project stakeholders can use to calibrate the reliability of work in progress andprovide feedback on the predictability/variability of logistic plans. The methodology of thispaper uses conceptual analysis, the metonymic mapping of key concepts from thethermodynamics domain to the construction domain and showcases the concepts throughPPC case studies. Information entropy theories are discerned in the PPC reports. Inconclusion, scientific information theories, principles and characteristics offlow, in contrastto managerial principles, provide a clearer background for visualizing a novel understandingof the state of the projectflow at the meta-project level. It could be argued that this paper isabout defining a reference discipline and construed as?construction science viewed throughthe lens of entropy?but this is not the focus of this paper but the topic of the next.