General Contractor Business Model for Smart Cities

5Research Findings

This chapter identifies the main problems encountered in construction today and suggests plausible solutions to resolve them.

This chapter includes contributions from various industry experts and scholars who the author interviewed using the IDI technique. The identities of the interviewees have been kept confidential throughout the whole text, and so we refer to them by their respective initials rather than full names. Further information on this and the IDI technique can be found in the appendix at the end of this chapter (section 5.5).

5.1. Problems

We herein present an inventory of the main problems encountered by construction companies today. We use the TLBMC’s four layers – economie, environment, social, and technical – to map and explain them. As you can see throughout the text, the problems identified are also split into two categories: controllable and uncontrollable. In our views, controllable problems simply denote project management problems that could be addressed and solved by construction companies once the appropriate measures have been implemented. However, uncontrollable ones – which we label O-B (Off-Balance) – are those that construction companies have zero control over, yet that could markedly affect their capacities planning in project management and put their project management structures in question. Urbanization, financing, legal and institutional barriers and state-imposed construction codes and standards are examples of uncontrollable, ...