Salam Al-Bizri

Salam has more than 30 years of experience in the Higher Education sector and the construction industry. Salam is now a senior lecturer at the University of Portsmouth. Her teaching interests are construction project management, technology clusters, design management and supply chain management.

With input from leading organisations in the field, Salam developed several courses and lectures and sourced and developed site-based case studies. She has been exploring issues surrounding the integration of design and construction processes and how, through education, a better understanding of the industry can be achieved and best practices delivered. By acquiring and exploiting the knowledge and skills of experts in the field, students can be educated in the cause-and-effect relationships resulting from decision-making. This is demonstrated as a best practice as well as illustrating the weaknesses in how activities are currently carried out and challenging the students to question the common management approaches.

Sustainable construction will require ever more integration between design and production and concepts such as technology cluster, integrated working of the team and work area control recognise the industry’s inherent complexities. Salam has been involved in developing an integrated project management framework for many years, and elements have been tried and tested in many projects. The parties in this framework have complex interrelationships, with the ultimate focus on the production process delivered through the work areas.  To achieve this focus, it is essential to create the right project organisation.   The attitudes and overall culture within the project should be modernised to operate the organisation effectively. The integrated project organisation framework implementation could lead to a radical rethinking of construction project management practice.

In addition to conventional academic research, Salam has been concerned with the problems of knowledge capture and the reuse of experience. To this end, she produced an interactive knowledge base of good construction management practices attached to a process map of the construction process from inception to completion. The practice has been gleaned from a wide range of experience: academic, theoretical, and practical, which, when integrated in this way, presents practitioners with a fast-track approach to rapid knowledge gain.

A continuing thrust of Salam’s work is how to embed changes in practice in a complex situation where the knowledge capability is variable and fragmented.  An example is the adaptation of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) to develop various performance-based decision support tools.