Also, a few individuals in the project have explicit responsibility for overall coordination (e.g., the project manager). By and large, however, participants adopt a view that focuses primarily on their individual tasks, with any concerns about these interdependencies addressed in a very ad hoc and reactive way. Most participants try to optimize their own work while the few people responsible for managing the project as a whole have little opportunity to optimize the entire system.
Clearly, it is beneficial to organize work in such a way as to minimize interdependency among work tasks. However, we contend that a weakness of current project management practice is that it tends to treat typical construction work tasks as being far more independent than they actually are. Instead, project management approaches should strive to make the interdependencies between work tasks more explicit. This does not increase interdependence and complexity, but it does make the existing interdependency and complexity more visible, and therefore more manageable. In summa- ry, construction projects are complex because of the quantity and interdependency of their components, and project management techniques should strive to make these interdependencies explicit by increasing the level of integration among the project views.
2.3. Views and integration in project information
All design and management tasks work with information rather than physical resources. This information all describes or models the
physical construction project, and thus it can be said that all designers and managers work with information models of the project. To a large extent, each task works with a type of information model that reflects that task's unique view or perspective, with little integration between these different information views. This wide range of disparate information views adds to the fragmentation of these tasks. With a few exceptions (such as the basic architectural plans), there is very little of a common, shared vision of the project across all participants— at least until the physical structure begins to emerge, at which point the physical building itself provides a unifying common perspective for all participants Fig. 1 links projects, participants, and information to concepts of view integration. It shows several levels of abstraction of a construc- tion project. To the far left is the actual real-world project itself (no abstraction). Opposite, on the far right, are the mental models that project participants build up in their own minds to understand the project (i.e., individual's understanding of the real-world project). However, we have shown that designers and managers generally interact with the project through various information models,
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