The Power Of The Project Management Contractor:Case Study Of A New Town Construction Project

The construction project(CP) will be delivered under various stakeholders and each stakeholder will has inconsistent interests. Thus their related decision behaviors will interact accordingly. Conflicts will be occurred among them frequently. For the project management contractor(PMC), acting as an agent for the client to manage the client's CP in a changing project management(PM) context, while performing his function of participation in decision making and authorities entrusted by the client, the effectiveness of the work will be influenced by the power factors of PMC's own.This thesis explores the challenges of the management power met by a PMC through a description and analysis of fives typical events of a de facto CP. And the thesis is a case study research, where five tough to be handled PM events are selected with the titles of the Approval of PM Plan, the Ceiling Bidding Price Determination, the Scheduled Plan of Five Days a Story, the Contractor Selection Process and the Broken of the Building Safety Protecting Net respectively. Based on the framework of power basis in terms of expert, referent, legitimate, reward, coercive and the information, factors that challenge to the PMC powers are examined, which fall down into the PM experience of the decision maker of the client and his executives, the decision making processes of the clients to the complication events, the communication among the stakeholders, the contractors' nonperformance and the effective response of the PMC, the interferes of local government administration to CP, the consideration and support of client's leader, the comprehensive of contractors' credible capacities as well as the communication skill of the PMC etc. are contributed to the challenges. The writer argues that such findings are meaningful to research and promote the position and the function of PMC in practice, and however, due to the fact that the findings are only the outcomes of five typical events, so all the hypothesis need to be tested by the further investigation in PM practice. Meanwhile the writer also assumes, under the current environment of PM in China, that developing a further deeply research on the power of the PMC, sorting out pertinent tactics to accept the challenge encountered in PM practice, would have a significant impact on promoting of the PM specialization in the nation.