101 Case Studies in Construction Management

Abstract

This book began many years ago with a collection of just a few short stories. There was a desire within the Department of Construction Management at the University of Washington to strengthen the students’ written and verbal communication skills. The stories transformed into case studies, and were first used to improve the students’ presentation skills within a project management course and also to provide practice for the subsequent quarter’s capstone course. At that time, the department was just becoming active in student competitions. The activities of research, working in a team environment, preparing both a written and verbal response, and competing among fellow students helped the department raise their competition teams to national recognition. A few construction stories were added each year. This book now includes 101 case studies, with subsections for several cases and numerous questions for each one. The sources of the cases are mostly from projects that I have personally been involved with, from over 40 years in the construction industry as a carpenter, project engineer, project manager, owner’s representative, construction consultant, and expert legal witness. A few of the topics have been donated from other friends in the industry. The cases included here represent concepts from actual construction projects, but no real construction project has been used in this book, and any similarity with an actual project is coincidental. Several industry professionals and professors at the University of Washington have been using and supplementing to this body of work for two decades. The first edition of this book was titled the same as this new edition, 101 Case Studies in Construction Management. It was a self-published manuscript and available only for my students and local contractors, which used it as an in-house training tool. The second and third editions were retitled Who Done It? 101 Case Studies in Construction Management, and were made available to other universities through Amazon/CreateSpace. This new format has returned to its original title, but now