The pre‐design stage of construction projects has become a focal point in design management research in the last decade, as it is primarily the source of problems such as rework, change orders, and contractual claims. In particular, it is widely acknowledged that client briefing is an intractable problem which many projects encounter. Primarily this is because little attention is given to assessing the needs of the client, stakeholders and those of the design team. With this in mind, this paper presents a soft system approach known as strategic needs analysis (SNA) to assist clients, stakeholders and their design teams in determining their strategic needs for a given project. The rationale for using a SNA approach during the early stages of the project development process and in relation to the strategic environment of the client organization is presented and discussed. The SNA process is described and applied to two case study projects. It is concluded that SNA can improve the strategic decision‐making process of a project, as clients are able to identify their strategic needs and thus improve the effectiveness of the briefing process.
A number of approaches towards the strategic client briefing process have been developed. We begin by briefly introducing what the literature and practitioners say such approaches should aspire to, before explaining how and why we developed our own approach. RequirementsMany approaches, such as decision analysis (Coyle, 1972;Raiffa, 1968;Watson and Buede, 1988) aim to create and develop alternative strategies during strategic management activities. However, few of them appear to have been applied to the process that converts the strategy into property investment decisions or corporate real estate to support them. Indeed, Green (1992Green ( , 1996, Latham (1994), Egan (1998) and Chartered Surveyor Monthly (1998) have highlighted the need for skilled specialist practitioners to bridge the gap between corporate strategy and the development of building projects to realise such strategy.Any process adopted should occur during the project inception stage. It should confirm and extend the decision to build (new-build, extend, renovate, upgrade, remodel) and it must reflect the environment of the organisation by being sensitive to the strategic direction identified within the strategic management process. The literature also states that any such process should capture the organisation's mission, vision and values that guide the process of considering alternatives that satisfy the strategic direction already determined. The process needs to be useful, flexible, well organised, sensitive to client and stakeholder needs and designed to provide more effective, efficient, innovative and better solutions (Gray et al., 1994;Karma and Anumba, 2001).Our own discussions of a proposed methodology with several client bodies, consultants, academics and colleagues pointed to a series of additional features that should be incorporated into any strategic client briefing process. However, the challenge was to have a minimum number of characteristics whilst still largely achieving the aim of each suggestion.
A decision‐making framework was developed and applied in regional Australia to identify adaptation issues arising in agricultural systems and rural production as a consequence of climate change. Australian agriculture is very susceptible to the adverse impacts of climate change, with major shifts in temperature and rainfall projected. An advantage of the framework is that it provides a suite of tools to aid in the formulation of strategies for sustainable regional development and adaptation. The decision‐making framework uses a participatory approach that integrates land suitability analysis with uncertainty analysis and spatial optimisation to determine optimal agricultural land use (at a regional scale) for current and possible future climatic conditions. It thus provides a robust analytic approach to (i) recognise regions under threat of productivity declines, (ii) identify alternative cropping systems better adapted to likely future climatic conditions and (iii) investigate policy actions to improve the sub‐optimal situations created by climate change. The decision‐making framework and its methods were applied in a case study of the South West Region of Victoria.
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