Evaluating and Retrieving Parameters for Optimizing Organizational Structures in Real Estate and Construction Management

Abstract

All organization is about creating structures. In particular, unique projects as are typical for Real Estate and Construction Management issues require a custom tailored organization due to the nonrecurring character. Moreover, as they are generally of large volume and traditionally tightly framed only an exactly fitting organization is capable to deal with the naturally given set of unknown parameters. Therefore, the term of Risk Management describes nothing more than an efficient organization where the treatment of varying parameters, i.e. risks, is well defined and prepared on an abstract level. Further abstraction of the question of an appropriate structure leads to principle considerations regarding the qualities of a structure, based on the fundament of Theory of Systems. Classical optimization methods are bound to fail here since they typically rest on the assumption of a given structure and are not flexible enough to create improved versions. However, parameterizing structures by the values of complexity, heterogeneity and recursiveness provide well-established assessment of the sensibility of organization structures regarding their stability, even against externally driven variations of internal variables. Thus, such parameters need to be retrieved from a given system and analyzed in order to allow judging the system's behavior in the long run as well as can be used for constructing add-ons to the structures in order to improve the efficiency of the organization. This focusses on encompassing characteristics like reducing complexity, increasing separability and stabilizing by the introduction of controlling elements. This paper is the revised version of the paper that has been published in the proceedings of the Creative Construction Conference 2018 (Zimmermann and Eber, 2018).