Project and Quality

Quality Assessment System in Construction (QLASSIC) was promoted by Construction Industry Development Board (CIDB) in late 2006. Apparently its main aim is to assess objectively the level of quality of the building construction work. Essentially the program comprised of two main components which are the assessment standard known as Construction Industry Standard (CIS) 7:2006 and the operation of the QLASSIC assessment. After more than five years of its existence, inevitably there are several issues prevailed that need to be addressed. Having said that leads to the primary objective of having this study is to explore the potential areas of improvement in QLASSIC. The respondents for this research were the construction personnel that have fair knowledge on CIS 7: 2006 and considerable years of experience in QLASSIC assessments. The data were collected through five focus group workshops consisted representative from the key stakeholders in QLASSIC assessments namely developer, consultant, contractor, Housing Tribunal and QLASSIC assessor. Altogether 66 respondents have participated in the workshops. This study had utilized questionnaire form as the research instrument. The data collected were analyzed using SPSS version 17. Generally this study was able to identify potential areas of improvement in CIS 7: 2006 as well as the operational of QLASSIC assessment. The output of this research is expected to provide the preliminary indications as areas that need to review and improve in an effort to improvise the implementation of QLASSIC by CIDB.

Abstract Information assurance (IA) projects are essential components of the information technology industry and often fail due to budget overruns, missed deadlines, and lack of performance by the project teams. The purpose of this phenomenological research was to explore the strategies necessary to improve IA project team performance. Lewin’s situational leadership theory was used as the conceptual framework for this research. Interviews were conducted with 20 IA professionals located in the Washington, DC Metropolitan area. The data were transcribed, coded, and clustered for the identification of common patterns based on the Moustakas’ modified van Kaam analysis. The major themes that emerged from the interview data included the importance of: communication and teamwork, technical knowledge, training, hiring of skilled resources, and balanced project teams. An organization-wide internal training program emerged as an overarching best practice to improve the leadership strategies within the IA sector. The research results may help improve project success and contribute in some small way to the growth of the IA industry.

This study summarizes the steps for forecasting Natural gas consumption in Bangladesh’s power sector using Box-Jenkins autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) time series model. For this study a structure for ARIMA forecasting model is being proposed where a time series is expressed in terms of past values of itself plus current and lagged values of a ‘white noise’ error term. Validity of the model was tested using standard statistical techniques and the best model is proposed on the basis of various diagnostic and selection & evaluation criteria. The findings of the study will provide policy makers in Bangladesh a long term perspective of natural gas consumption in power sector along with necessity of exploring other alternative energy sources and assist in adopting proper strategies to address the power supply situation of Bangladesh.

This paper examines the effects of macroeconomic variables like currency rate, inflation rate, real interest rate, gross domestic product and liquidity on the stock market index in Tehran Stock exchange during 1985 to 2015. Various econometric analyses such as Co-integration and Vector Error Correction Method (VECM) are employed on time series data. It finds that Iran’s stock market is positively influenced by the inflation and currency rates and negatively affected by the liquidity. On the other hand the relationship between real interest rates and stock price is positive but not significant.

The main role of financial reporting is transferring information to outsiders in a credible manner, which it is realized by high quality disclosure of financial information. We investigate the relationship between information disclosure with profitability ratios as return on assets, return on equity, return on sales and dividend payout. Also panel data techniques and Binary Logit econometric model has been used in the period of 2008-2012. The results show that there is no significant relationship between information disclosure with return on equity and dividend payout, but there is a significant relationship with return on assets and return on sales.

In this paper, we propose to integrate Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT), Genetic algorithm (GA) and Gantt chart (GC) for scheduling a construction project. Here, earliest start (ES) and earliest finish (EF) times of the activities are considered. Then, the parents, which depend on ES and EF, are selected from the uniform distribution. Crossover and mutation are implemented on the offspring for a better solution. The fitness, which represents the total cost, is computed. As a result, the finishing time and the cost expended for the project are minimized. In conclusion, the efficiency of the approach proposed is shown.

The aim of this paper is to present a modern model for optimization of relative efficiency of congeneric units benefiting from Imperialist competitive algorithm. The Imperialist competitive algorithm, which is regarded as a method in the realm of evolutionary calculations, dealing with finding an optimized reply to various problems of optimization, presents a social-political algorithmic evolution process for solving mathematical problems of optimization through mathematical modeling. Through accompany of data envelopment analysis method with this algorithm, herein this paper, a model has been proposed for optimization of relative efficiency of congeneric units. Experimental results obtained from execution of the proposed algorithm reveal that the said model has succeeded and also showed that the proposed algorithm has most convergence speed, compared to primary Imperialist algorithm.

The Land Use Charge Law (LUCL) of Lagos state is a form of public intervention in urban land market to generate the needed revenue for government expenditures, and for wealth redistribution. As a property tax, it was meant to correct the perceived distortion in Lagos land market – a situation whereby less than one percent of the population controls more than ninety percent of its land value. Although, the tax policy is laudable, the society is not always aware of the impacts such policies have on real estate market, yet they are not without implications either positive or negative. This paper therefore examined the perspectives of landlords and the Estate Surveyors and Valuers in Lagos, Nigeria on the impact of Land Use Charge (LUC) on volume of property lettings, rent and other letting fees in the study area. Structured questionnaire was randomly administered on 135 Estate surveyors and Valuers and purposively on 135 landlords. The data collected were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Findings reveal that the LUC had no effect on volume of property letting, and larger percent of the Valuers (70.8%) and landlords (88.8%) affirmed that rent has increased in Lagos due to LUC. The paper concludes that though LUC has had no noticeable impact on volume of letting transactions probably due to limited land size and high population of Lagos, it has however led to increase rent and other letting fees in the state with its attendant consequences on urban renters

Disbursement involves approval, allocation, release and transmission of funds or grants to projects for implementation. Funds are always disbursed according to funding and implementation schedules agreed upon by the parties and based on the submitted budget and work plan. The developed schedule with each grant recipient is necessary to ensure proper funding accounting, reporting and timely disbursement of funds during the implementation phase to the devolved units. Implementation is the carrying out, execution, or practice of a plan, a method, or any design for doing something. The government of Kenya has made deliberate efforts to decentralize most of its development projects over the past few years, through the use of decentralized funds key among them are, Local Authority Transfer Fund (LATF), Constituency Bursary Fund (CBF), Women and Youth Enterprise Fund and Constituency Development Funds (CDF). This was made possible through Constituency Development Act of Kenya, (2003) which was enacted in order to re-distribute resources to every corner of the country so that poverty levels can be alleviated. Devolved funds have been taunted as the most effective way of fighting poverty on the strength of their ability to bring governance closer to the people thereby addressing their priorities. In a perfect world every project would be "on time and within budget." But reality tells a very different story. Even if the budget and schedules are met, one must ask if the project delivered the results and quality expected. True project success must be evaluated on all the three components otherwise a project could be considered a failure. Delays in disbursement of funds lead to delay in land acquisition among other factors which eventually has a serious impact on the overall performance in the implementation of the development project. The impact of delays in acquisition resulted into cost overruns due to price variations and time overruns and had an impact also on the successful completion of the development project.

The organizations are interacting with suppliers, customers and even competitors in order to achieve the customer satisfaction as well as the greater success and profitability in the new commercial environment. Supply chain management is the most important part of the company’s strategy to optimize the planning and implementation of the processes to respond to the market changes and it will not be possible without the efficient and effective internal process. Certainly, to ensure effectiveness of the integrated processes, they should be periodically evaluated by some indicators. Therefore, this study has discussed the effectiveness of supply chain management using the balanced scorecard methodology, to do which a goal programming model is presented to minimize sum of deviations. In this study, first, the indices affecting the four perspectives (financial, customer, internal process and learning and growth) of balanced scorecard in ISACO Corporation are identified. Then, the weight and prioritization of the indices affecting the four perspectives of balanced scorecard are calculated, and then, the distance of performance of each one of the perspectives of balanced scorecard from the goals of the studied company has been measured. In addition, the goal programming model is presented to evaluate the effectiveness of supply chain in order to minimize sum of absolute deviations using the goal programming model.