What is Seen as the Best Practice of Site Management?

Anssi Koskenvesa¹ & Satu Sahlstedt²

Abstract

The effect of management on site performance and productivity is presented by a number of researchers (Chormokos & McKee 1981, Arditi 1985, Banik 1999, Salminen 2005). Site managers play one of the key roles in the overall project success (Djerbani 1996, Styhre & Josephson 2006). As superior managers are said to be almost twice as productive as their underperforming colleagues (Schmidt & Hunter 1998), the way we manage and lead our sites makes a big difference. The objective of this paper is to evaluate what kind of site management is considered to be “good”, what do construction companies in Finland see as the best practice and how does this “best” differ from others. To achieve the objective both a literature review and a set of interviews were conducted. Eleven top foremen were chosen by their employers mainly due to their ability to achieve the targets concerning time, schedule and quality. These top site managers shared their “best practice” views on managing factors affecting work site and construction productivity in a series of interviews in spring 2011. Based on these interviews, the main factors affecting productivity on the sites are scheduling and the temporal management of the work site. The quality of design, the scheduling of the design process and the quality of resources were also viewed as strong factors affecting the opportunities of advance planning and site performance.

Keywords

Site management, best practice, continuous improvement, respect for people, scheduling

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Reference

Koskenvesa, A. & Sahlstedt, S. 2012. What is Seen as the Best Practice of Site Management?, 20th Annual Conference of the International Group for Lean Construction , -. doi.org/

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