Chaos in construction: labour productivity and its impact on planning and organisation of firms

"The paramount message of this research is that performance of the construction industry is poor. The question however is, what should managers do in order to improve the performance, meet clients demands and satisfy their employees? Not an easy answer, indeed. The literature review on labour productivity and related studies has clearly shown that it cannot be easily modelled or predicted. In addition, researchers could not even agree whether productivity is random or not. The first studies were therefore merely statistical. The objective of this first step was to determine whether labour productivity is random. The analyses demonstrated that it is not, but rather resembles a chaotic nature. In order to prove this, several non-linear analysis were applied. It appeared that labour productivity data is noisily chaotic with a memory on initial conditions of five to eleven days. Such results signified that planning for more than the duration of a memory on initial conditions is unrealistic. Based on that, a new so-called process planning methodology has been proposed and tested on five industrial projects in Slovenia. The outcomes demonstrates that short-term planning is indispensable and increases overall performance significantly. However, the implementation of the process planning methodology has imposed structural changes that transformed the firm into a self-organised system. That needed a conceptual and theoretical explanation. The last part of research was therefore focused on the development framework of the necessary restructuring process, and its general theoretical explanation. Finally, if managers really want improvements, they should be aware that no significant progress without significant changes in a firm s organisational structure. These changes, however, always involve employees - autonomous and creative individuals, and that should never be forgotten."