Structured Review of M4I Projects
Start Date: Apr 2001
End Date: Apr 2002
Project Status: Complete
At the launch of Rethinking Construction in 1998 the Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott and Sir John Egan challenged the construction industry to initiate 50 demonstration projects with a total value of £500m. To date there have been more than 400 such projects with a total value over £6bn. The demonstration projects have engaged a wide range of companies in the implementation of the Rethinking Construction agenda. Initially the demonstration projects were expected to implement all of the recommendations of Rethinking Construction. In practice, there were many difficulties in the project teams understanding the full scope of the radical agenda that had been set.
The School of Construction Management had prepared an early review of the first year’s demonstration projects and found that the level of innovation was very patchy for a lot of very practical reasons. Most of the project teams had focussed their efforts on the partnering and collaborative working section of the agenda. This raised issues of innovation. Was it clearly enough defined? Were the organisations involved in the projects sufficiently receptive to the concepts of innovation and could they absorb the lessons that could be learnt?
This organisational aspect had been studied in research laboratories so the question this project was seeking to determine was whether the lessons learnt in other sectors could be transferred to construction. At the same time the validity of the research tools used in those sectors was to be evaluated.