Value management: expanding the methodology through futures techniques
Authors
Citation
專業建築, no.1, 2000, pp. 24-27
Abstract
Increasingly value management is expanding its traditional range of techniques which underpin the job plan methodology. There are three reasons for this.
(i) Practitioners anticipating the ever expanding needs of clients;
(ii) The highly competitive nature of value management delivery, requiring practitioners to constantly create "unique selling points";
(iii) The job plan always was the basis of common sense group problem solving and easily absorbs new techniques.
For all three reasons above, at least one consulting organisation has begun to incorporate futures techniques at the strategic level of consideration of major projects. Furthermore, at the tactical level, when carrying out value engineering exercises, simplified aspects of futures techniques can be used to test whether appropriate decisions are being made at a detailed design stage.
Futures information gathering techniques include passive and active environmental scanning. Trend analysis both looks at understanding existing trends and then seeks to extrapolate those trends into the future.
Techniques associated with forecasting include the future wheel and future webs and the cross impact matrix.
Perhaps one of the best known futures techniques is scenario planning. This starts with the identifying of focal issues, selecting scenario logics, fleshing out the scenarios, considering the implacations of several scenarios and finally selecting leading indicators and selected sign posts.
The imaging workshop is a way in which new possibilities for action and change can be carried out. In the workshop a specific issue is focused upon and situated at a specific future time. Participants become a part of that future and develop as clearly as possible a description of aspects of that future. Images are described and nurtured and explored, teasing out central themes. Consequences of the future are examined. Finally this future is evaluated as if it is now the present. The main features of that future are then translated back to the real present to understand the implications.
Can some of these futures techniques be successfully incorporated into the value management plan?
(1) The job plan
(2) Ethos
(3) Pathos
(4) Logos
(5) An expanded methodology
(6) Futures techniques
Description
Subject
Type
Article
Format
Date
2000
Language
en