Developing Design Process Management in Infrastructure and Construction Engineering

Abstract

Problems in buildings can often be traced back to the requirements processing in the design phases. In building design, requirements processing is mainly discussed under the term briefing and is a critical and a problematic process. This study focuses on the design stage and aims to summarize and analyze requirements’ processing concepts and practices by a systematic review. The main problems, guidelines, tools and methods were analyzed and compared to the requirements engineering and management approaches. The findings indicate lack of consensus about key concepts and about the coverage of requirements processing, lack of applied methods and lack of practitioners’ knowledge. From the gaps, we proposed a definition for the key concepts, and scheme of this whole requirements processing in building design and indicate recommendations for future research, which can guide important contributions, especially if supported by practical experiences. Building construction projects worldwide routinely fail to meet their schedule and cost objectives. The current paper basically emphases on design changes as the main contributing factors to delay and cost overruns. Substandard project coordination and futile communication management are sustained problems with the construction industry, particularly as to the management of design changes. To rectify the captioned issues, this study is aimed at exploring the underlying causes of design changes, the resulting rework that is damaging to project performance, communication management process and collaboration in a project-based setting through the review of the literature. A conceptual model for design change management was then expressed to be the distinguished outcome of this study. The framework describes the importance of applying effective communication process and informed management decision in dealing with design changes. It provides a coherent and holistic view to understand the dynamics of design changes in a building construction project. The findings contribute useful starting point for future overrun causation and mitigation studies.