Post-Project Review Essay On Burj Khalifa Construction.

Conduct a post-project review and report on a completed project. The post-project review must analyse the success or failure of the applied (or failure to apply) project management framework, principles, processes and / or practices. The post-project report must provide recommendations, based on:

•  How future project management performance could be improved through the adoption of the applied project delivery process as identified from your post project review; or

•  How future project management performance could be improved through the adoption of the theoretical project delivery process as identified from your research into project management.

Time Management Issue

Description of the project

Burj Khalifa was renamed from Burj Dubai and is situated in Downtown Dubai, UAE (Vinod, 2015). Its total height is 829.84 Metre and has 162 floors; it was designed by ‘Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’ and developed by ‘Emaar Properties’ with an investment of 1.5 Billion USD. The construction activities started on September 21, 2004 and completed on January 4, 2010.

Burj Khalifa has many awards on its name, it is the only man made building which has made numerous world records, like:

July 2007: tallest building in whole world, after 141 storied completed

September 2007: free-standing tallest structure, after 150 storied completed

April 2008: man-made tallest structure, after 160 storied completed

September 2010: it received the award of ‘Best project of the year’

For the construction of the Burj Khalifa, around 22 Million man-Hours were used with 60 companies from every corner of the world (Essays, 2013). So the problem is bound to happen and the project was delayed by around 1 year. It took 5 years & 4 months to complete the project.

In this current report we shall discuss on the issues which were faced during the construction phase of Burj Khalifa, how it was managed and then what we learnt from the failure. Three main focus points shall be the time management issues, cost management issue and the last would be the quality management issue.

During the construction phase due to various reasons the project got delayed. There was a labor strike in March 2006 and November 2007, around 2500 labors went to strike and even vandalized many properties; this has halted the whole construction work at site. Their demand was to raise the basic pay from $4 for 12 working hours and unhealthy & unhygienic atmosphere of labor camps respectively.

Governments forced the labors to join the construction work or they may be penalized according to local laws. As per any sources it could not be defined, that how much it impacted the time schedule, but it is obvious that it has impacted the work and can be considered as a major setback in timely completion of the project.

Since there was strike, so any strike has only result that is ‘Failure’. Moreover, since it was left unresolved, so the anger remained inside the labor and obviously the productivity could have got impacted and resulted in delay. After the threatening also when the strike was not finishing then the local government assured of increasing their basic pay and the labors resumed the job. But due to such issues the prestigious project got so much delayed.

So the lessons learnt from the above discussed issue is that, we must always perform the ‘Stakeholder Identification’ (Markwell, 2010) and identify their needs and expectations well before the start of the project, so that the issues can be addressed since the beginning of the project itself to avoid any delay of work after the project initiated.

Like in current case, if the local government or any consultant would have done the stakeholder analysis or at least considered labor as their stakeholders, then they could have arranged for the wellbeing of the labors at the labor camp area and even fixed a higher rate of wages and awarded the contract to the contractors accordingly. Then this problem could have been avoided and the building could be completed on time.

Cost Management Issue

In November 2009, Dubai had to face an economic crisis and there was a debt of 59 Billion US Dollar (GKToday, 2013). The construction section alone was having a share of around 22% of the total GDP, so the crisis had direct impact on the all construction project and Burj Khalifa was sharing 50% of the total construction value in Dubai. Moreover, the construction of Burj Khalifa got heavily impacted due to the cause and many contractors even could not pay the labors and they had to return to their own countries. So, we can understand that how tough the conditions were for the construction.

The crisis was caused due the busting of the economic bubble, mainly the rates of real estates. It actually happened due to investing more on building highly luxurious facilities and using the foreign funds to build (China Central Television, 2009). After sometime, Dubai had planned the restructuring of 26 Billion US Dollars and the foreign investors again gained the confidence and the crisis ended slowly.

Since it was an economic crisis so all the stakeholders had to pay for the crisis and they were also not spared off. It has caused more ‘Failure’ to the project. The project was definitely delayed due to the crisis.

In large projects like Burj Khalifa which runs for few years with so much of complexity are always prone to get impacted by any this kind of socio economic issues. So especially for the large projects, we must always plan the budget well in advance and the financers need to be well informed about the upcoming events and its expected expenditures. So the ‘Cost Planning’ (Cost Engineering Consultancy, 2017) and ‘Risk Assessment’ (Watt, 2014)need to be done very cautiously by considering all probable kind of ‘Risks’ of the project and the overrun budget should consider the unknown risks and have some risk reserves in the overall project budget to counter with such unforeseen situations.

Pumping of the concrete slump up to a height of 828 meter was the biggest challenge according to the construction officials. For resolving it many technical solutions were identified but the issue remained with the flow of concrete, it pouring rate and setting time etc. all such issue aggravated after the tower reached 127 meter above the MSL. Here also they had to use world’s largest pump to generate enough pressure to transport concrete. Moreover due to the extreme conditions and especially in day time the temperature used to increase up to 50⁰C. Doing concrete at this high temperature is technically not advisable. Even though there were labors for all three shifts but in day time they were also not allowed to work.

The quality issue with the pouring of concrete due to very high temperature in day time was balanced by the cool temperature at night. So the concrete work used to be at night time only as there was no other alternative to the concerting issue.

Even though this condition was well known to all, but still it had impacted to the project schedule, as out of three shifts people could only do concreting at night. So it had obviously impacted the project schedule negatively.

So the lessons learnt from  the above quality issue, that we must always have a back-up of all such issues and need to arrange our work plan accordingly so that the issues which cannot be avoided and should not impact the project progress. So if we had done the quality planning and prepared the quality management plan beforehand, then it could have saved from such crisis. As in quality management plan, first of all the objectives need to be finalized and then the action plan for the quality control and quality assurance need to be worked out. For developing the document all the highly influential stakeholders like ‘Project Manager’, ‘Sponsors’ need to be involved in the process for its proper implementation.

Conclusion and Recommendation

So to conclude the report it can be seen that the three issues had diverted the project towards loss of time and obviously the money too. Since due to all the above reasons the project got delayed let it be the major labor strike, the quality issue so only could do in night time or the big Dubai debt crisis all has contributed to the delay of the project Burj Khalifa heavily by around one year.

We should always learn from the mistakes or the issue, so from this report the learning can be summarized and a common recommendation should be the proper following of the project management techniques or the methodologies. Because the techniques learnt here are the ‘Time Management’, ‘Stakeholder Analysis and Management’, ‘Cost Planning’, ‘Risk Planning’ all such things should be done well before the starting of the project. So that the appropriate way out could be defined or the proper arrangements could be built for avoiding the issues. Project Management Methodologies must be used in all stages of the project.

References

China Central Television. (2009). Dubai World -- A dream built on bubbles. Retrieved August 23, 2017, from www.cctv.com: https://www.cctv.com/english/special/dubaicrisis/homepage/index.shtml

Cost Engineering Consultancy. (2017, February 23). Cost Management explained in 4 steps. Retrieved August 23, 2017, from www.costmanagement.eu: https://www.costmanagement.eu/blog-article/198-cost-management-explained-in-4-steps

Essays, U. (2013, November). Project Time Management Of Burj Khalifa Economics Essay. Retrieved August 23, 2017, from www.ukessays.com: https://www.ukessays.com/essays/economics/project-time-management-of-burj-khalifa-economics-essay.php?cref=1

GKToday. (2013, November 22). What is Dubai Crisis 2009? Retrieved August 23, 2017, from www.gktoday.in: https://www.gktoday.in/what-is-dubai-crisis-2009/

Markwell, S. (2010). Identifying and managing internal and external stakeholder interests. Retrieved August 21, 2017, from https://www.healthknowledge.org.uk/public-health-textbook/organisation-management/5b-understanding-ofs/managing-internal-external-stakeholders

Vinod, R. (2015, September 4). Burj Khalifa Tower. Retrieved August 23, 2017, from guide2dubai.com: https://www.guide2dubai.com/visiting/attractions/burj-khalifa

Watt, A. (2014). 16. Risk Management Planning. Retrieved August 23, 2017, from opentextbc.ca: https://opentextbc.ca/projectmanagement/chapter/chapter-16-risk-management-planning-project-management/