17-08-2012, 03:29 PM
Are Construction Disputes Inevitable
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INTRODUCTION
DEALING with dispute is part of portfolio of engineering
managers. In construction, due to the quantum involved
and disruption so caused, several industry reviews have raised
concern over the dispute “epidemic.” The voluminous publication
on construction dispute is a good evidence of its significance.
Newey [1] provided the invaluable data illustrating the
rising number of construction dispute reaching the court in the
United Kingdom. He advocated that prevention is better than
cure. Prevention of dispute can be achieved through cogent management
such as prudent staffing policy, vigorous quality assurance
plan, and realistic tender preparation and separating duties
of design from contract administration. Engineers and managers
can expect problems regularly in construction operations.
In fact, problem solving skill is one of the core skills required of
engineers and managers. Technical problems may be complex
but usually manageable. Disputes are different because of the
legal ramifications and personalities involved. As such, managing
construction dispute is akin to conflict resolution. Despite
its wide publicity, construction disputes are seldom defined,
possibly because of its complex nature and intertwinted
underlying causes. This paper describes a conceptual model to
identify construction dispute. This conceptualization nicely fits
in a fault tree (FT) framework, an instrumental tool to analyze
system failure. Through the use of a hypothetical case, the likelihood of dispute occurrence is assessed.
CONSTRUCTION DISPUTE: TOWARD A CONCEPTUALIZATION
The above summarizes previous efforts in identifying construction
disputes, moreover it is also noted that this is a lack
of a conceptual framework to describe construction dispute. It
is, therefore, proposed that construction dispute include three
basic ingredients: 1) Contract Provisions, 2) Triggering Events,
and 3) Conflict [57]. This is presented as a conceptual model
called “dispute triangle” as shown in Fig. 1. The details of these
three ingredients of construction disputes are described in the
following sections.
Sufficient Level of Conflict
In construction, the words dispute and conflict have been
used fairly loosely and almost as synonymous. However,
as discussed in the previous section, conflict is in fact an
underlying cause of dispute. In other words, dispute is the
manifestation of the underlying conflict(s). People are the principal
resource of all construction projects [30]. Construction
professionals such as project managers, architects, engineers,
and quantity surveyors and the like are the key participants
of every construction project. They are typically drawn from
different organizations to form a project team. Each project
team is, thus, a mini-society with a complex set of interrelated
relationships requiring cooperation and collaboration from
conception to completion of the construction project.
AN ASSESSMENT OF LIKELIHOOD: FT ANALYSIS (FTA)
FTAis a technique developed in the early 1960s to analyze the
safety of electro-mechanical system [56]. It is a “top-down” or
“backward” approach of finding the causes of an undesired result.
FT models can be graphically presented to showthe parallel
and sequential causes or events that contribute to a predefined
top undesired event. FTA, thus, depicts the logical inter-relationships
of basic events that lead to a hazard. In an FT model,
a hazard is first specified, and the system is then analyzed in
the context of its environment and operation to find credible sequences
of events that can lead to this hazard.
CONCLUSION
Researchers in construction dispute have largely focused on
the legal dimension of the subject. In the study presented in
this paper, an analytical approach was advocated for the conceptualization
of construction disputes. Construction disputes
are characterized by the co-existent of three ingredients; Contract
Provision, Triggering Events, and Conflict. By considering
the occurrence of construction dispute analogically as a system
failure, the three dispute ingredients are framed in an FT model,
with which a fuzzy probabilities evaluation of construction dispute
occurrence was completed basing on a hypothetical project
with features commonly founded in complex project delivered
in a traditional design then build approach in Hong Kong. The
results indicated that the occurrence likelihood of construction
disputes lies within the range of 0.997 to 1.000. This result supports
the general accepted views that in complex construction
project, disputes are inevitable.