Ashwin Mahalingam

Oversight arrangements which articulate technical, contractual and organizational decisions in a project domain constitute project governance. In the light of rapid globalization and an increasing number of complex, pluralistic and heterogeneous projects, the need for contingent project governance arrangements which bridge both stability and temporality of project decisions is emphasized in the literature. Nevertheless, inadequate attention has been paid to study how these governance arrangements are actually set up on contemporary projects. We use a combination of institutions-based and practice-based lenses to develop arguments on how governance arrangements are initially selected and replicated or revised, thereby leading to the emergence of order in project governance structures. We gather empirical evidence by qualitatively studying the shaping of project governance structures in a metro rail project in India. Our data show how the project promoters drew from the Delhi Metro’s governance structures to make technical, contractual and organizational decisions in the Chennai Metro, and then contested or stabilized these structures within the project field through situated interactions. Consequently, we identify 11 underlying mechanisms of sustenance and change of governance arrangements and project norms. By bridging both generic and contextual governance perspectives, the study underlines the role of situated “governing” in (re)creating governance structures.

Infrastructure megaprojects can cause considerable inconvenience to external stakeholders such as project communities, stakeholders in lands and stakeholders in existing services. Managing these external stakeholders is difficult as they interact with the project across permeable boundaries, are unaccountable to the requirements of the project and cannot be governed with contractual instruments or conformance to standards, as is the case with internal stakeholders. Hence the project team must resort to other strategies to manage these stakeholders. There is at present little other than scattered accounts of the use of these strategies in the literature. What is missing is a framework to explain how such strategies work to manage external stakeholders. We use organizational power theories drawn from frameworks stressing both the dimensions and the circuits of power to understand how strategy and power interact in the process of managing external stakeholders. This research uses the case study of a metro rail project in India compiled from 30 semi-structured interviews, 168 news media articles along with their 446 user comments, and 640 social media tweets along with 435 community comments. Using a qualitative research methodology, we highlight relations of persuading, framing and hegemonizing strategies employed for managing the external stakeholders in the project. Covert power-based framing and hegemonizing strategies shape the visible overt power-based persuading strategies employed to manage external stakeholders.

External stakeholder support is critical to the success of megaprojects, necessitating strategic engagement, often using Information and Communications Technology (ICT). We conducted 30 semi-structured interviews with a megaproject team and analysed their social media communications with the project community. The findings show three ICT practices used for managing external stakeholders: visualisation, simulation and social mediatisation. Taking a sociomateriality lens we demonstrate how these practices are used for diverse unintended uses to manage external stakeholders. Anchored in a dimensions of power framework, we discuss how these ICT practices were strategically used for persuading, framing and hegemonizing external stakeholders in megaprojects. Theoretically, we highlight the role of ICT for managing external stakeholders over the current use of improving the competitive advantage of internal stakeholders. Practically, social media is used to articulate practices in all the strategic roles, positioning it in a role as a critical ICT tool for external stakeholder management in infrastructure megaprojects.

During the construction and operation phases, infrastructure projects face social unrest, such as community protests, boycotting of services as well as negative press reports of these events and other aspects of the project. There is a need to consider the concerns and moral issues of the community throughout the lifecycle and not just at the inception phase. From an organizational power perspective, we use frame analysis as a suitable lens to understand how projects shape community perceptions to try and construct sustainable legitimacy. The research reports on a case study of a metro rail project in India. 166 daily news articles, 446 user comments and 30 semi-structured interviews with the project team were analysed. We observed framing strategies used in practice, such as need framing, pride framing, community-centric framing and blame framing. These framing strategies observed in the project community had impacts labeled as the solution frame, the trend-setter frame, the important frame and the own-up frame. The relationship between the framing strategies and their effects are theorized through four propositions. We argue that through these framing strategies some issues were strategically hidden while some were strategically promoted, thereby influencing the perception of the project. An improved perception of the project can reduce resistance and conflicts during the construction and operation of the project.

External stakeholder management is important for managing an infrastructure asset throughout its life cycle. There is a dearth of research exploring the asset creation team’s rationalities invoking the strategies used for managing external stakeholders. The circuits-of-power theoretical framework, which considers actors within their social context, is apt for studying the rationale of the asset creation team in carrying out these strategies. Through a systematic in-depth case study of a metro rail asset in India, diverse data were collected from multiple sources, such as semi-structured interviews, news articles and social media; a set of strategic rationalities used to frame messages to stakeholders was identified. These included pride in the asset, importance of the asset, overemphasis on time and acceptability of public inconvenience. The asset creation team, as part of the broader asset community, is also influenced by the strategic discourses aimed at managing external stakeholders. The authors discuss the implications of the strategic discourses used for asset management on project, programme and portfolio management. The relationship between strategic discourses striving to manage assets and the corresponding asset creation team rationalities affords multiple avenues for future research.

Progress monitoring is key to any successful project. Often this is a hectic task which involves man power in preparing Daily Project Reports (DPRs) to physically monitor the activities on site. Recent developments in the fields of photogrammetry and point cloud processing techniques have laid a new path in using point-clouds for visualization and progress monitoring of projects. However conversion of point clouds to an accessible BIM format is still a researchable topic. Present techniques include manually creating models by visualizing the point cloud which is still a time consuming task. This paper tries to provide a new methodology in using photogrammetric point clouds for progress monitoring with very little manual intervention. The proposed methodology uses Revit’s Dynamo and cloud processing techniques to successfully estimate the progress and the cost of activities on site. This method effectively uses the STL file format as a key to convert models and compare the as-built and as-planned Models. Using this method, we were able to estimate the progress of concreting activities with 100% accuracy and estimate the progress of masonry wall construction with 95% accuracy.

Contractual governance is considered sufficient to govern particular types of exchanges. In the presence of well-known transaction hazards, however, relational governance is increasingly viewed as a necessary complement to limit transaction hazard risks in many circumstances such as public-private partnership (PPP) arrangements. Consequently, PPPs should employ different governance mechanisms such as trilateral governance and shadow of the future to achieve this complementarity. Relational contracting, which aims to govern transactions through mutual relationships within a project's overall contractual framework, offers a specific avenue for this purpose. In particular, relational practices such as partnering and regular meetings between the client and concessionaire can be included in a project contract to improve relational governance. Different researchers have previously performed in-depth reviews and syntheses of governance mechanisms, but a similar synthesis related to relational practices is missing from the literature. Also, in theory, relational practices specified in contracts can act as enablers of governance mechanisms in PPP projects, so this linkage needs further investigation. Consequently, a review of the literature was completed to synthesize relational practices for inclusion in PPP contracts, and these practices were also linked with well-established governance mechanisms. Six categories of contractual relational practices were identified: communicating/negotiating, partnering, resolving conflicts, monitoring, executing changes, and allocating risks which were further linked with governance mechanisms. For instance, the trilateral governance mechanism was linked to dispute review board, mediation, and arbitration practices. This research provides insights into effective contractual designs by identifying relational practices that can trigger governance mechanisms and promote contractual and relational governance complementarity in PPP projects.