Integrated Team Design Process - Successful Stories of Hong Kong MTR Corporation Projects

Achieving design quality with systematic design management is essential for any construction project. This becomes all the more important and difficult for infrastructure projects which are complex in nature and involves several disciplines and multiple stake holders. Normally, the client and the design team including the lead consultant and various specialist sub-consultants work in different places in their respective offices, which normally result in problems such as poor coordination, lack of collaboration, excessive variations, design changes, abortive reworks and unwarranted delays. MTR Corporation sets up integrated multi-disciplinary design teams using the combined resources of MTR Corporation and the consultants working together in an Integrated Team Design Process. Such integrated design team office arrangements include advanced information and communication frameworks as well as electronic project management systems. Also, MTR Corporation through integrated team design develops the design in stages, namely feasibility study, preliminary design and detailed design; thus repeatedly reviewing and improving the design exhausts all possible options and the best and practical design emerges out. This paper also presents some case-study based success stories of effective project management with such integrated design team process from recent MTR projects. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd.