A Conceptual Study of Key Barriers in Construction Project Coordination

The complexity of the nature of construction makes it one of the most adverse businesses that has ever existed. Construction projects have often suffered from high fragmentation, large waste, poor productivity, cost and time overruns, and conflicts and disputes for a long time. Thus, many new and innovative management and procurement systems in construction are introduced such as partnering, joint venture, alliances, supply chain management, enterprise resource planning (ERP), just in time (JIT), and total quality management (TQM) to meet these challenges. However, these construction management and procurement systems are meaningless without coordination, a vital managerial principle and activity, which provides the best cooperation among team members. Although coordination plays crucial functions throughout the building process especially during the design and construction stages, some failures in construction projects adopting coordination principles are still observed. Hence, a study is carried out to investigate the key barriers of coordination in construction project. Through the literature review, five groups of key barriers are established in this paper, including the nature of construction, traditional contractual arrangement, construction participants, characteristic of organization and construction management approach. The investigation of these key barriers is expected to assist the construction players in coordinating their projects towards a better implementation of the innovative management and procurement systems. Lastly, worthwhile new research topics are suggested by this paper in developing the coordination key performance indicator (KPI) and critical success factor on construction project for further studies.