Social Network Analysis-Opportunities in PPPM

Construction productivity have been a classic concern with negative growth in the period 1964-2012 [1], the most likely reasons behind this situation may be the highly fragmented project workflows, procurement systems based on competitive rather than collaborative teams, paper-based project delivery systems (PDS) with a low use of technology in their processes affecting the flow of data and information between the stakeholders creating conflicts and lowering the quality of the projects along all their life cycle.

The introduction of CPM/PERT in 1958’ has been considered the start of the modern Project Management [2], since then, technology has gradually extended in the discipline but is not until the past decade when their use is being more extensive, the evolution of the technology applied in projects is transforming the Building Industry moving from a paper-based towards a BIM-based type of projects shifting to a lean collaborative processes [3] [1].

Since 2000’s it has been observed a continuous growth of complexity in projects[4][5]caused by the increasingly use of technology, project size/scale, construction methods, stakeholders diversity and overlapping processes in the life cycle of a project, as a result Project Managers have been facing an increase of challenges at strategic, organizational and human resources level[6].

Projects are team-based developed, currently, as a result of the technological advancements projects are producing an immense amount of data, sorting useful data to transform in coordinate and productive information that flows through all the processes along the life cycle of a project is crucial in their success.

Social Network Analysis (SNA) appears as recently technique that explore, maps and measure data & information flows and relationship between organizations, groups, people or other entities.

The aim of this article is to explore different opportunities in the combined use of Data Analysis and SNA for project managers.