Analytical methods in construction procurement and management: A critical review

The pressure for reform bearing upon the construction industry has become overwhelming and some fundamental changes in the way that construction projects are procured and managed are taking place. The industry and its clients and commentators, as well as those engaged in research, need a means of analysing the changes being brought about within the industry. This paper reviews the current approaches to describing and analysing the procurement and management systems within construction. Some approaches are found to have merits in relation to the analysis of specific aspects of procurement or management (for example, critical path analysis effectively demonstrates the interdependence associated with individual project decisions). None of the existing approaches alone, however, provide a rigorous, quantitative analysis of construction procurement and management systems within the context of individual construction project coalitions. This paper concludes that social network analysis, although linked to a large body of quite complex theory, provides a quantitative and comparative methodology for analysing a number of characteristics within both traditional and new procurement approaches. The main issues are appropriateness of level of analysis, uniformity and non-hierarchical approach to visualisation, comparability across differing governance systems, ability to reflect a non-linear, complex, iterative and interactive process, and the growing importance of non-dyadic relationships.