Development of a collaborative briefing approach for infrastructure projects in Hong Kong

Briefing, where a construction client conveys his / her needs and aspirations to the design team, is described as the first and most important step in the process of delivering a building or other physical infrastructure. Due to the significant commitment of resources, it is recommended that clients carefully define and examine their needs in terms of project requirements, before and during briefing. Nevertheless, briefing is subject to many practical limitations. Many clients may overlook important aspects of briefing and various problems such as delays and cost overruns may ensue. Although the literature shows a substantial amount of studies that have addressed some briefing problems, briefing is still reported to pose continuing problems in the construction industry. Given the importance of improving the conceptualisation and implementation of briefing, a 'collaborative briefing approach' was developed in this study to improve the briefing process and its outputs, with particular reference to large-scale infrastructure projects, which involve multiple interfaces with many stakeholders. The above approach is designed to empower the traditionally mobilised briefing team to work collaboratively with a large group of multi-disciplinary stakeholders as an integrated briefing team in the form of a virtual organisation through a shared digital workspace created on a computer network. The workspace enables all members to work together remotely and asynchronously so as to achieve greater stakeholder participation in briefing. Since stakeholders contribute in bringing professional knowledge, experience and creativity to briefing, the enhanced stakeholder participation will increase their inputs and result in more fruitful briefing outputs. In this study, a comprehensive survey was first conducted to investigate and compare the strengths and weaknesses of common briefing practices in the Hong Kong construction industry, so as to establish a theoretical foundation for the research. An ‘Integrated Collaborative Briefing Methodology’ (INTERCOM) was developed to translate the described approach into a set of actionable methods and job plans for practical use. The INTERCOM comprises of five components: (i) a value based briefing methodology, (ii) a collaborative briefing job plan, (iii) an integrated briefing team, (iv) a collaborative briefing platform, and (v) facilitation service. The first four components were developed and validated by a group of well experienced multi-disciplinary industry practitioners. The fifth component merits a separate research and development exercise. The validation results reveal that the concept of collaborative briefing approach and the design of the INTERCOM methodology were well supported by the practitioners. In addition, it was concluded that the methodology would contribute to improve the briefing process by facilitating team management, enhancing requirement definition and promoting consensus building. It also improved requirement comprehensiveness, decision transparency, decision reliability, and decision satisfaction, as well as the value and quantity of the requirements specified in the brief. The validation also highlights some practical limitations including potential political barriers, time constraints, specialist facilitator and resources limitations. Moreover, the net benefits of the developed ‘collaborative briefing approach’ are concluded to be very worthwhile, both in principle and for practical purposes. The additional significance of this study is that it researched and developed a "panoramic view" of briefing practices from a practical perspective, linked the knowledge of briefing to the domain of collaboration through a “collaborative briefing approach” and developed the framework for a new generation of ICT systems for supporting and substantially improving the briefing process.