cee 420 - construction PRODUCTIVITY
Construction productivity is a mandatory course for the Construction Engineering and Management program at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UIUC. The core of the course relies on developing optimization techniques to improve the performance of construction processes. These techniques are based on the analysis of the actual operations, which includes the evaluation of resources participating within the planned and scheduled activities such as human resources, materials, tools, and equipment. Under this scheme, the course was organized into different teams of 8-9 students each, which represented the 16 largest construction companies with headquarters around the world. These groups were in charge of designing a renovated and innovative strategic plan for the company and solving productivity issues of diverse construction projects on behalf of this, which ended up with the performance of the Term Project by analyzing and coming up with solutions for real construction projects located at the Champaign – Urbana area. These solutions were focused on optimization of their actual operations. Our team represented Odebrecht, the largest construction company in South America with headquarters in Brazil, and I was selected as a Team Leader to conduct the performance of all team members and other collaborative agents involved within the construction of such Term Project.
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How did CEE420-Construction Productivity improve my leadership perspective? By providing opportunities to develop innovative approaches to improve construction operations, and understanding the dynamic of change occurred at construction organizations and projects in several ways.
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Developing leadership skills required the accomplishment of different activities with team working. One of the first activities we performed as a Team was the elaboration of the Strategic Plan for Odebrecht. This task required the use of adaptive approaches to understand the policies and business of the company to build up on such basis. After getting along with the core values and strategies of the company and its stakeholders, we analyzed different possibilities were the company could improve its current operations and expand its investment to new horizons where the construction industry requires companies with its expertise. After this analysis we came up with a plan that involved setting new strategies and goals to enhance Odebrecht’s performance within four different scenarios: Investments, Innovation, Social and Environmental Care, and Global positioning. As a result of this strategic plan, we applied our creativity and professionalism into practice with the submission of a video – presentation, where our strategic plan task is explained in detail, as seen below.
After executing some other tasks, we faced the hardest challenge of the term depicted by the coordination, problem-solving, and innovation required to come up with solutions to optimize the operation of the Multimodal Corridor Enhancement Project “MCORE” at the Champaign – Urbana and -College Town area. This project required the application of observation techniques and productivity measurements to analyze the existing operations and submit a plan that includes suggestions to improve some of the idle tasks that decreased productivity at the construction site. As a team, we identified the major issues during the construction operations and implemented solutions based on the method of crew balance analysis and proposed, for instance, the improvement of activities such as sewer installation with the application of other analyzed techniques to increase productivity enormously compared with the approaches utilized at their daily basis operations. the result of the term Project can be observed though the video – presentation attached below.
In conclusion, this course reinforced the concept of team and change management, innovation and global community, which facilitated the progress of growing within the competencies set at the Illinois Leadership Certificate Program.