Professional collaborative cultural model for Malaysian construction industry

There is missed coordination due to professionals’ collaborative culture from design development (DD) to contract implementation (CI) stage resulting in many variation orders (v/o) in the construction industry. The purpose of the study is to understand how CAD visualization culture influences the effectiveness of AEC (architect, engineer and contractor) professionals’ collaboration during design development process. This is a case study research on a Malaysian project organization (M Project) and another British project organization (UK Project). It studied the impacts of CAD-assisted visualization collaborative culture that could improve productivity while reducing time and delivery wastage during design of industrialized project. This study hypothesized that with competent technological support, productivity can be improved with increasing understanding of cultural knowledge among professionals during the design phase, hence reducing waste in industrialized project. The study affirms the existence of four American’s project operating environmental characteristics occurring in Malaysian and British projects. However, M Project displayed vertical structural organizational configuration and did not use any BIM technology, whilst UK Project displayed horizontal structural organizational configuration and used BIM technology. In the subsequent computational experiment, the study found the M Project demonstrating multi-hierarchical structure within intensive task intensity, while the UK Project demonstrating flatter-hierarchical structure within reciprocal task intensity. In testing and validating potential optimal organizational configurations, the study found M Project can be equally productive as the UK Project when multiple-hierarchical structure and reciprocal tasks’ complexity were embraced together with BIM technology during its design process. These results would guide in workplace productivity improvement by introducing BIM technology yet, allowing existing multi-hierarchical structure to support the Malaysian construction operational environment. Results of the study are expected to guide multi-national companies in configuring their organizations to equate the productivities of their parent companies. Additionally, local organizations could easily adapt to new operational configuration with minimal human costs. Among the benefits for enabling adaptive local operational configurations, local organizations could strategize to partner easily with international collaborators. In such situation, developing countries could gain higher GDP income. The study would like to recommends future study on identifying reciprocal measures throughout the whole industrialized project lifecycle process.

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