Influence of clients' design management capability on the design performance of water conservancy projects

LIU Yang; TANG Wenzhe; WANG Yunhong; ZHANG Huicong

doi:10.16511/j.cnki.qhdxxb.2022.22.048

Journal of Tsinghua University(Science and Technology) >

2023 , Vol. 63 >Issue 2: 242 - 254

DOI: https://doi.org/10.16511/j.cnki.qhdxxb.2022.22.048

CONSTRUCTION MANAGEMENT

Influence of clients' design management capability on the design performance of water conservancy projects

LIU Yang ,
TANG Wenzhe ,
WANG Yunhong ,
ZHANG Huicong

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State Key Laboratory of Hydroscience and Engineering, School of Civil Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China

Received date: 2022-06-13

Online published: 2023-01-14

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Abstract

[Objective] Water conservancy projects play a critical role in irrigation, power generation, water supply, flood control, and navigation. The design processes are of great importance to the water conservancy project delivery with client requirements transformed into reality, thus making it imperative for clients to focus on design management. Poor design management of clients can result in several design problems, such as inadequate understanding of the operational and maintenance requirements in designs, design delay, the high construction cost of design options, and poor design constructability. The client-related design problems can be attributed to their poor design management in contract management, interface management and technical audit of designs, insufficient use of incentives for designers, and inadequate design resources. Existing studies have mainly focused on design management from the designers' perspective. However, a systematic analysis of the impact of clients' design management capability on the design performance has not been conducted so far. Thus, the purpose of this study is to establish and test a conceptual model of clients' design management and reveal the causal relationships between their design management capability, use of incentives for designers, design resource allocation, and design performance in water conservancy projects. [Methods] In this study, multiple methods were used to collect qualitative and quantitative data from the field survey on the water conservancy projects in Ningxia, China, including questionnaires, interviews, direct observation, and project document reviews. All respondents had relevant professional experience in project management and either worked at the ministry of water resources in the country or participated in the water conservancy projects in Ningxia. The sample mean estimation, analysis of variance, consistency test, confirmatory factor analysis, and structural equation modeling (SEM) were used to perform the statistical analysis of the quantitative data. Moreover, the bootstrap method was adopted to test the mediating effects in the model. [Results] The results indicate that clients' design management capability has gained acceptance by the participants of the water conservancy projects of Ningxia, while notably, the design-related contract management is more challenging for clients themselves. In addition, clients should give their concern for the trade-off between rewards and punishments for design incentives, as well as optimizing the design period and the allocation of information resources. The SEM results confirm three paths from clients' design management capability to the design performance of water conservancy projects with the standardized regression coefficients under a significance level of 0.001. The first path is clients' design management capability → design performance; the second path is clients' design management capability → design resource allocation → design performance; and the third path is clients' design management capability → use of incentives for designers→ design resource allocation → design performance. [Conclusions] This study reveals that clients' design management capability can directly promote resource allocation and also exert an effect on design resource allocation through the use of incentives, thereby achieving a superior design performance. The use of incentives and design resource allocation contribute a chain mediating effect to clients' design management capability and design performance. The findings of this study can provide theoretical and practical guidance for the clients of water conservancy projects to conduct effective design management and improve design outcomes. The clients are suggested to enhance design management through improving their capabilities of design-related contract management, interface management and technical audit capabilities, and effectively allocating resources for the front-end design, geological exploration equipment, design period and information management, as well as applying incentives to motivate design optimization and innovation.

Key words： clients' design management; incentive; resource allocation; design performance; water conservancy project

Cite this article

LIU Yang , TANG Wenzhe , WANG Yunhong , ZHANG Huicong . Influence of clients' design management capability on the design performance of water conservancy projects[J]. Journal of Tsinghua University(Science and Technology), 2023 , 63(2) : 242 -254 . DOI: 10.16511/j.cnki.qhdxxb.2022.22.048

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