Showing papers by "Ammar Peter Kaka published in 1997"

Delegation and Span of Management in the Construction Industry

Abstract: Little has been written in the literature about the effectiveness of delegation and span of management in the construction industry. Construction works are relatively labour intensive, therefore, managers consider manpower as the main resource for building projects and should be managed effectively. The data in this study are collected from sixty seven construction managers by means of interviews and discussions. Those managers are involved in managing housing, schools, health centers, roads, water and sewerage projects in Gaza Strip. The objective of this paper is to examine the issues relating to delegation and span of management in the construction industry in Gaza Strip. The relationship between delegation, managers’ efficiency and work productivity is discussed. The findings reveal that inadequate delegation of authority has caused significant work disruption. Construction managers are overworked and their foremen and workers became frustrated. Lack of delegation has led to a decrease in managers efficiency and work productivity. It has been found that a manager can cope with ten subordinates and a foreman can deal with thirty five construction workers.

Adopting a Semi-ideographic Approach to Cash Flow Forecasting

Abstract: Cash flow forecasting is an important part of the management of a construction company. A large proportion of construction company bankruptcy is due to poor financial planning. Many of today's cash flow forecasting models rely on standard Scurves. A standard S-curve is often chosen from a library of curves developed by calculating the average monthly percentage values of a group of completed projects . Therefore a single standard S-curve is often used to represent many projects that belong to a particular group. In this paper, the authors demonstrate that the above approach (i.e. nomothetic models) will not always yield the most accurate results. The paper proposes that an idiographic (a specific curve for a specific project) model should be adopted instead. The paper begins by describing briefly a nomothetic model which was developed using 150 projects. This model was based on groups classified in terms of duration and cost. The models were then modified to be able to incorporate the affects of the actual duration of the project concerned. The paper concludes by testing the accuracy of the proposed idiographic models. The results confirm that better accuracy is achieved when using this approach.