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The writers present the results from a research project that explored the factors which design organizations and individual designers take into consideration when they address the management of change to the design function over the long-term future. First a brief description of the telegenesis project which formed a background to the research project is provided to help place in context the solutions that emerged from the investigation and development. The principal development from the research project was a transitional framework of how design will evolve into the future based on a pop-i configuration. The concept of pop-i is outlined. The transitional framework projects the future state of design, defined by the time horizon projected to 2020, and based on information from the sectors of aerospace, construction, and product design. The rationale and use of the transitional map is explained. The transitional map is recommended as an audit system for managing the long-term future of design organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most discussion of projects in general project management literature centres on either a single project or multiple projects managed simultaneously. Authors overwhelmingly concur that general project management literature is heavily biased towards the single project paradigm, with little written on the multi-project environment. However, many projects are part of a programme of work or a portfolio undertaken within a clearly identified business plan. By far the greatest project activity takes place within portfolios, or programmes of medium to small sized projects, and not the traditional, large projects with dedicated teams of people.

Present trends toward multiparticipant megaprojects have heightened the need for effective and efficient evaluations by stakeholders, both of themselves and of fellow participants. Feedback from such evaluations helps improve the management of ongoing and oncoming projects. It also assists in a more objective selection of suitable organizational and/or individual participants for future projects, based on their past performance. However, a recent investigation indicated an apparent lack of systematic project evaluations in construction projects in particular. The need was noted to identify comprehensive sets of evaluation criteria, as well as to formulate sets of indicators corresponding to such criteria, by which performance may be evaluated. Data banks of typical values of such indicators in specific types of projects also needed to be developed for benchmarking. Although the development of such a framework may appear to be a formidable task, its feasibility and usefulness were demonstrated in a pilot exercise in Sri Lanka and the UK, as reported in this paper. One of the useful devices developed in this exercise was a “knowledge-based” or “expert system” front-end to select appropriate modules of the proposed evaluation system for a particular evaluation. Expert assessments of typical or average values of relevant indicators were also useful in the absence of adequate information to develop comprehensive data banks in certain project categories. Subjectivity in multicriteria assessments was reduced by pairwise comparisons as incorporated in the system proposed in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a variety of financial ratio analytical methodologies for evaluation of construction companies corporate performance and identifying potential insolvent contractors. These methodologies comprise traditional approaches, subjective index and ratio models. The shortcomings of the financial ratio analytical methods are highlighted and some approaches to improving their efficiency presented. It has been suggested that standardizing the assessment criteria of subjective index methods for the construction industry can reduce the variation in different expert evaluations and so lead to a more uniform assessment. Secondly, the transformation approach has been recommended as a means of improving the efficiency of ratio models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]