Clients within the construction industry have become more aware of benefits that exist and can be reached when going through a major construction project, benefits that invite for efficiency improvements both during construction and its prophases. New methods of execution and their different advantages are evaluated. This change has opened the door for new business models such as Construction Management (CM) but it also demands the contractors to adapt and come up with more client-customized methods. The thesis goes further into the question of when to use which execution method and describes how the client thinks in the decision-making process. What factors affect the client when making the choice between CM and contractors? It investigates and highlights the behaviors, features and processes that affect the client in their way towards an optimal investment. It further explores what the contractors and CM firms can do in order to adapt to their clients and win their trust. The Analysis & Conclusion chapter provides a summarized view of What the clients have in mind but also Why and How they make their decisions. Throughout the literature review and interviews we found five different parameters as particularly important: • Experience – what has been done before and was it successful? • Availability – how easy is it for clients to recall the different actors? • Relations – optimal teamwork and collaborations or just personal relations and quick fixes? •Price/Risk – what risks are included and how is that linked to costs? •In-House Resources – what does the clients’ own organizations look like and what resources are available? Clients wish for a riskless, cheap and short construction process with retained good quality and without friction between organizations. On their way towards this goal they face several complex aspects as well as their own human characteristics, being affected by biases and heuristics. This thesis shows that the choice between these two business models is complex and not obvious but that improvements in the client’s evaluation and decision-strategies can be made. The right business model for a projects specifics’ can, in particular for redevelopment projects, give several benefits. It also shows that the execution firms can change and adapt in many ways in order to influence their situation with the clients.

For some considerable time, client satisfaction has been a problematic issue in the UK construction industry with many projects failing to satisfy the client needs and meet or exceed the client expectations. Client satisfaction is, however, a key performance measure and a major determinant of project success. There is a common belief that strategic decisions made by clients have a significant impact on the levels of client satisfaction. Strategic decisions in the context of construction projects are often associated with project stages including pre-design, design, tender, construction, occupancy & maintenance and disposal and vary in nature. Consequently the impact of strategic decisions on client satisfaction depends as much on timing as on the subjects of the decisions. While such findings are useful to facilitate the industry’s focus on addressing the failure in achieving client satisfaction, and point to the route for improvement, they are arbitrary and do not provide a systematic basis for investigating the real impact on client satisfaction. The nature of strategic decisions and the significance of its impact on client satisfaction have not been clearly identified and client satisfaction has remained an elusive issue for a majority of construction professionals. This research was hence undertaken to seek empirical evidence of an interrelationship between strategic decisions and client satisfaction. Defining strategic decisions, often associated with project stages, as ones that are complex and made under uncertainty and have a long-term impact on project success, a quantitative research methodology combined with qualitative approaches, was adopted in investigating the interrelationship between strategic decisions and client satisfaction. Findings of a detailed literature review revealed that client satisfaction at any stage depends as much on the service quality attributes of service providers including overall service delivery, people of service providers and communications with clients as on the influence of strategic decisions and the client itself. These performance attributes and the groups of strategic decisions, referred as strategic decision cluster (SDC), were further assessed and the relationships between these measures and strategic decisions were examined using factor analysis and multiple regression modelling techniques. Analyses revealed SDCs including Design Approach, Procurement and Implementation predict better the outcomes of service quality and hence higher levels of client satisfaction. Service delivery and communications with clients have a positively significant correlation with the levels of client satisfaction. Of these two attributes, communications with clients makes the largest unique contribution to the variance and is considered the better predictor for client satisfaction. The developed models is validated via external and internal validation and the findings support the thesis that strategic decisions have a impact on client satisfaction by strongly influencing the performance of service quality although causality cannot be assumed. It is recommended that service providers including contractors and consultants devote more efforts to improve their performance on the attributes of service quality identified as having significant association with client satisfaction, particularly service delivery and communications with clients. Further research efforts focusing on providing a practical tool or expert system so as to address the practical issues for a wider range of clients and service providers are also recommended.

This study within organization theory takes a process perspective and focuses on how the dialectic interaction between the structuring and improvisational parts of organizing is handled in construction sites. In studies of organizing where reality is seen as socially constructed with focus on the subjective source of organizations reality, the individuals understanding of the identity and the rolecan be seen as central to interpret the social processes. Depending on how the actors understand their role in the context, the acting/interacting is going to beinfluenced. In times when the different orders of organizing have contrastingcontents the understanding of the role and the context is going to challenge. The actors then have to consider and reconsider the understanding of the role.To make the identification perspective possible to study a theoretical framework is constructed where community, meetings, insecurity and sense making arehighlighted as important aspects in the identification process. The empirical partis based on narratives from ten construction clients. The narratives were initiatedby descriptions of four situations, describing four occurrences, which provide four different attitudes to how the dialectic interaction between different ordersof organizing can be handled. The analysis of the narratives is based on how theactors in there argumentation express doubt and faith. Expression of doubt andfaith is used as tools to make the identification process concrete to be possible tostudy in a fruitful way.The study points out how doubt and faith are used to create pictures of the actors understanding of the role and its context. The analysis gives three identificationpatterns. The characteristics and content of the patterns are different whichinclude a difference between the understandings of the tension in the dialecticinteraction of different organizing orders. We can therefore say that the threepatterns give different starting points for action and interaction. Finally the implications of the results from the study are discussed in relation to management accounting and organizational change. / QC 20100811