Abstract

Changes often happen during the process of the construction project. Main changes could be absence of workers, breakdown of machines, and adverse weather. These changes can impact the project at all kinds of levels. Meanwhile, the project manager needs to make appropriate decisions to minimize the impact of changes. Typical decisions would be re-allocation of resources and re-arrangement of the tasks. However, how to make appropriate decisions for change management is not easy to answer.

In this context, we propose the Decision-based Change Management (DCM) approach as a change management tool to deal with the change scenarios in construction engineering. The DCM approach is intended to help the project managers (especially new project management practitioners) to assess the level of change impacts and select an appropriate change option for project revision. The DCM approach in this thesis is applied to the cases of sub-project of pipeline installation in the Wastewater Treatment Plant Project, which addresses how to find an appropriate change option to deal with the change scenarios concerning absence of the workers for a period of time. In specific, three change options are categorized for the DCM approach based on two types of schedule revision activities (Patch Actions & Repair Actions). When a change scenario occurs, three key change impact factors are used to estimate the level of change impact for this change scenario during the implement procedure of the DCM approach. Then, a proper change option can be chosen to revise the schedule based on the estimated level of change impact.

At last, we propose evaluating two criteria (project delay and re-organization efforts) to examine the quality of the revised schedules. Experimental results of the cases indicate validity of the DCM approach to tackle most of the change scenarios concerning absence of the workers in the construction project.