Application of Communication Management Technologies on Construction Projects

The use of technology has become necessary in all human endeavours because of the benefits it brings as the world continues to experience globalisation. The construction industry is one of the industries that is most reliant on information to successfully execute its activities. However, it has over the years been realised that the uptake of technologies is relatively low in construction as compared to other industries. With the rapid innovations in technology in the world, participants of the construction industry still do communicate with each other through conventional approaches such as hardcopy printouts and face to face meetings. Construction projects have however been evolving over the years from simple structures to complex projects and to that effect, a lot of project communication must be done efficiently, which is one of the major benefits that Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) provide. Although there are a good number of communication technologies which present numerous benefits to the user including increased productivity, it is still under-utilized on construction projects. Against this background, this research was initiated to find out the communication technologies that are used for project communication management. The research further sort to find out the barriers that have hindered the successful adoption of communication technologies on construction projects over the years so that tailored measures can be put in place to enable their successful implementation which was one of the objectives of this study. This thesis thus set the aim to identify factors that promote the adoption of communication management technologies on construction projects in a bid to contribute towards the increased use of technologies for communication in construction in Ghana. A survey was thus conducted using a close-ended questionnaire to elicit responses from Project Managers on construction projects who were chosen through a purposive sampling technique. The collected data was analysed using the mean score and the Relative Importance Index. The findings of the research show that mobile devices and the internet, Microsoft Office Suite Products (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, MS Project) and electronic mail are the most used technologies. Lack of legal enforcement support for the use of ICT, poor internet connectivity and inadequate ICT content in construction education systems were found as the major barriers to the successful adoption of technology for project communication. The results also show that the most important enablers for the adoption of technologies for project communication management include the development of a realistic and reliable electronic database in the organisations and good organizational management support. Upon these findings, the study suggested the development of a database that is very reliable in organisations to boost the ease of project information tracking. It was also suggested that organisational management support should be increased to encourage the use of technologies as well as increasing the technology content of academic courses so that graduates would come out ready to use technologies in handling activities and more specifically project communication management

Source: KNUST