Combining manufacturing management thinking, methods and tools, especially supply chain thinking and management tools, to transform from construction logic to product logic is the key to breaking and establishing the project management system.
Project management is facing a reorganization of the underlying logic
The industrialization of construction is the inevitable development of the construction industry to the current historical stage. Since the 1990s, when the country put forward the overall strategy for the development of construction industrialization, the development of the construction industry has shown obvious characteristics-the rapid growth of the implementation area of prefabricated buildings. From the definition point of view, the prefabricated building is the integration of prefabricated parts and components to form a building. Compared with the traditional construction mode, factory prefabrication and integration become the key difference. Prefabrication represents a large number of factory-made production methods; integration represents the essential difference between the on-site crafting method and the traditional crafting method.
Project management is currently the most important management mode for the construction industry to achieve production delivery. With the emergence of new production methods in the construction industry, project management is also faced with the real need to reorganize the underlying logic and adjust and change from cognition to methodology.
The current construction project management system in China mainly originated about 40 years ago. At that time, the Construction Industry Department of the State Planning Commission and the Ministry of Construction proposed the project method construction method based on the experience of the Lubuge Hydropower Station project. After nearly ten years of optimization and promotion, it gradually became the most important project management model in the domestic engineering field. Project method construction is essentially a summary of the practice of international engineering management and technical methods in China at that time. At the same time, it combines the current situation and development needs of the construction industry in the early stage of reform and opening up, including the relatively rudimentary integration capabilities of construction companies. Considering the lack of market resource endowment and unreasonable allocation at that time, a methodology was proposed after the summary and refinement of the construction authorities and experts at that time. The basic logic of project method construction is based on the basic construction method of on-site manual operation, with cost-benefit as the management core, market-oriented configuration of elements, introduction and application of competition mechanism, establishment and overall planning of enterprise resources and management chain through process management methods, and improve the overall efficiency of the enterprise. This methodology has played a huge role in the domestic construction industry since the 1990s. The overall efficiency of the construction industry has been significantly improved, providing a strong impetus for the rapid development of the construction industry.
With the development of society and economy, the development environment of the construction industry has undergone great changes. First, the evolution of the legal system has promoted major changes in the contract performance environment of construction enterprises. Second, the marketization of construction engineering production resources is becoming more and more sufficient, the quality, supply quantity and supply efficiency of various elements have been greatly improved, and the resource integration capabilities of construction enterprises have also been greatly improved. The third is the gradual popularization of digitalization. The speed of efficiency improvement in other industries has been significantly accelerated, and the speed of efficiency improvement is significantly higher than that of the construction industry. The efficiency of the construction industry has lagged behind and is falling behind at an accelerated rate. Fourth, industrial workers have completely withdrawn from the construction industry, and the construction site is fully controlled by migrant workers.
The above-mentioned changes have actually had an impact on the current project management system and have gradually deepened and strengthened. On the one hand, the project management system based on the project method construction 30 years ago, despite constant repairs, still has many problems in terms of systematization, systematization and leadership (such as management problems of migrant workers, quality problems of delivery, problems of civilized and safe construction, and continued low efficiency and benefits, etc.). On the other hand, digitalization, as an external force, is having a huge impact on the construction industry. The impact of the two attributes of digital tools on the project management system needs to be re-recognized. One is the attribute of the tool, that is, digitization has become an important and revolutionary production tool, affecting all aspects of the economy and society in an all-round way. New tools or technologies may change the existing production relations in the construction industry, but the current construction industry has almost zero awareness of this impact. Second, digitalization is a way of thinking, which profoundly affects people's psychological state, cognition and way of thinking. Likewise, the construction industry is currently not thinking proactively and preparing for it. Therefore, from a fundamental point of view, the engineering project management system requires the industry to break away from the existing framework and logic and construct a new framework and logic, so that it is possible to optimize the system, improve it revolutionaryly, and adapt to the needs of the future.
It should be noted that the current project management system mostly comes from knowledge and management tool systems such as PMP and IPMP imported from abroad. Its basic logic and methodological structure are derived from foreign market environments, legal systems and management practices, and may not be suitable for the special domestic project management environment. After 40 years of reform and opening up, economic and social development has accumulated a lot of practical experience, which requires construction industry practitioners to construct a project management system with Chinese characteristics from the perspective of the current construction industry situation, as well as foreign development directions and trends.
In summary, the underlying logic of current project management has created a great contradiction with the actual market conditions and development needs. The contradiction lies in the fact that the legal environment, resource environment, methodology, enterprise resource integration capabilities, management and technical tools related to the construction industry are fundamentally different from or have made great progress 30 years ago. This requires the construction industry to re-recognize the status quo and trends of the industry, recognize the demands and direction of change in the development of the industry, and abandon the traditional thinking of holding on to incompleteness.
How to restructure the project management system
First of all, we must attach great importance to digitalization and truly achieve deep integration. As a tool, the construction industry needs to be proactive and deeply integrated with digitalization, and be prepared mentally and materially for major or even dramatic changes in production relations. At present, the digitalization of the construction industry has started, but it generally stays at the level of the so-called "smart construction site", with cool display, limited digital tracking of measure items and limited depth of auxiliary decision-making as the main application methods. Such a status quo obviously does not conform to the laws and needs of development. From the perspective of way of thinking, practitioners in the construction industry are generally conservative, not aggressive, and do not accept digitalization as a way of thinking. This influence is reflected in the questioning of tradition, in the refusal to accept new unknowns and the spirit of risk, and in not pursuing active exploration and in-depth innovation, but putting new wine in old bottles, changing soup without changing medicine.
Secondly, at the technical level, how to deeply integrate project management with the manufacturing industry is a problem that has to be faced under the policy environment with increasing requirements for the industrialization of the construction industry. Project management should expand from the only center of "site" to two centers of "site" and "factory". At the same time, how to introduce the ideas and tools of supply chain management in the manufacturing industry to solve various efficiency problems in the industrialization process of the construction industry is also an important issue in the transformation of the engineering project management system.
Thirdly, in the development of the construction industry during the 40 years of reform and opening up, there have been various problems caused by the lack of industrial workers. Especially in the development process of construction industrialization, the problem of lack of industrial workers is more prominent. These problems are reflected in the fact that "the project site is in the hands of migrant workers". The construction industry needs to implement the transformation of migrant workers into industrial workers as soon as possible, solve the status quo of "the site is in the hands of migrant workers", change the existing production relations, and promote and complete real project management reforms in line with current events!
Finally, from the perspective of business models, many large enterprises, especially central state-owned enterprises, focus on developing the investment + general contracting model to expand the market. This mode is completely different from the traditional construction according to drawings. Construction companies need to think from a product perspective, not a construction perspective. Thinking from the perspective of products, it is necessary to adjust the cognition and relationship of the three elements of "people, property and property". The element of "humanity" has been mentioned above, and it needs to be considered from the perspective of industrial workers. "Wealth" and "things" also need to be observed and thought from the perspective of industrialization, redefine the connotation and extension, and rethink the organization and operation mode. This is a major breakthrough to the traditional project management system.
Summarizing the above discussion, the author believes that the main directions for the optimization and adjustment of the project management system in the future are as follows: First, the digital development of digital tools and platforms, solving the problems of process reengineering, management tool efficiency improvement, management coverage expansion, data and information flow, and three-element efficiency improvement. The second is to combine manufacturing management thinking, methods and tools, especially supply chain thinking and management tools, to transform from construction logic to product logic, which is the key to breaking and establishing the project management system. The third is to fundamentally solve the problem of industrial workers, as a sufficient and necessary condition for project management reform, rather than simply training migrant workers. The so-called fundamental solution is to allow migrant workers to truly become industrial workers in the construction industry and transform them from the peasant class to the working class. (Source: "Construction Enterprise Management" Author: Tian Kegeng, Vice President of Beijing Heneng Habitat Technology Co., Ltd. Original title: "The underlying logic of project management has undergone fundamental changes-On the transformation of project management system under the industrialization of construction")