Steps to consistency in management practice across multi organisation construction project teams

Industries such as Medicine are investing heavily in the collection and common provision of practice knowledge so that there is a consistency of service provision. Construction has yet to do this in such a consistent way. There have been Best Practice Programmes in the past and there is currently the Knowledge Transfer Network but these have largely been based on providing links between knowledge users and providers rather than a consolidation of the knowledge into effective guidance. This paper describes an approach developed to overcome the problems and issues in the construction industry, particularly in the management of projects. Failings on projects of the team to be working to the same management standards, procedures and protocols often leads to poor performance. This has led to the call for a consistent approach to construction project management that draws upon current best practice and demonstrates how to avoid such project disasters by doing the right things at the right time. The approach developed here is similar to that in the Map of Medicine. There a decision map is set out relating to diagnosis and with treatment guidance presented at each point in the map. For construction management a process map of the complete construction process has been set out and at each activity point a pull down box delivers guidance and best practice for undertaking the task. The guidance has been culled from research, practice guidelines, case studies and relevant practice. The difference in this approach from corporate knowledge management is that the guidance is an independent consolidation of the industry's expertise presented in an easily assimilated and usable form. The barriers to implementation of knowledge management within construction enterprises have been reviewed and the approach developed here is designed to overcome them. Furthermore the issues of getting consistency across the many organisations involved in a construction project has also been addressed with this approach.