Staff Profile:Dr Milan Radosavljevic

Name:

Dr Milan Radosavljevic

Job Title:

Lecturer

Responsibilities:

• School Director of Enterprise
• Director of modular MSc programmes
• Director of MSc Project Management

External Responsibilities:

• ARCOM (Association of Researchers in Construction Management) committee member
• Member of CIB Working Commissions W102 Information and Knowledge Management in Building and W65 Organisation and Management of Construction
• CIRIA (Construction Industry Research and Information Association) Construction Process Panel – Elected Member, 2007 – 2009
• PoCKeT (Proof of Concept Knowledge Transfer) – External Evaluator
• CEBE (Constructing Excellence in the Built Environment) Better Ways of Working (BWW) Group member

Areas of Interest:

In general I am interested in cutting edge research on employees' creative participation for maximising competitive advantage and consultancy in project management and organizational performance.

Research interests:

My recent research on short-term construction planning revealed interesting interconnectedness between construction planning and attained levels of employees' creative participation. These findings led me into studying organisations from a sociosystemic perspective by identifying firms in particular as autopoietic entities that exist in the communicative space. The study has resulted in a unique model of social autopoiesis that relies on clearly distinguished properties of our existence in the physical space and firms' existence in the communicative space yielding two new terms (autokoinopoiesis – autopoiesis in the communicative space and autophysiopoiesis – autopoiesis in the physical space).

A notion that autokoinopoiesis (i.e. firm's "life") and autophysiopoiesis (i.e. employee's life) are interrelated should be of particular interest to firms. Successful firms thus have successful employees that constantly improve their ability to successfully work with each other. However, some firms are more successful than others having a greater capacity to facilitate creative behaviour of individuals and groups. But how do we measure this capacity? How do we know that a particular firm has a greater capacity than some other similar firm? How do we know that success results from this capacity and not from temporal individual efforts? How do we improve the capacity? In order to answer these questions my main interests currently focus on ideactivity, a composite measure of organisational capacity to facilitate creative behaviour.

Consultancy interests:

In order to be successfully completed to high standard and within time and budget, projects require adequate and timely construction planning. My research on labour productivity shows that detailed construction planning beyond two working weeks is unrealistic and as a result I have developed the so called Process Planning Methodology (PPM), a short term planning methodology that integrates all areas of project and firm organizations. In the methodology, planning is not only defined as forecasting prior to the start but as a sum of all continuous-improvement type of activities which are conducted by all actively involved participants in a particular process, in order to successfully start, improve, execute, manage and finish that process. The newly developed methodology has been applied to several off-site construction projects and generated 50% increase in profitability, time reductions of up to a week and significantly improved quality.

Global competition gives firms very little space for achieving competitive advantage. The only sustainable approach with which they can achieve competitive advantage is by maximising employees' creative participation. It is successful harnessing of employees' ideas for improvement, new products and processes that distinguish top performing firms from the rest. The experience shows that firms often struggle in appropriately motivating their employees. More often than not they resort to various more or less successful bonus schemes that only reward harder work. However, my applied research shows that employees can be much more effectively motivated if firms develop an organization-wide system to harness their ideas. It is not the question of whether they have ideas but rather how to harness their ideas!

Research groups / Centres:

Publications:

Refereed Journal Papers

Radosavljevic, M. (2008) "Autopoiesis vs. social autopoiesis: critical evaluation and implications for understanding firms as autopoietic social systems", (In press: International Journal of General Systems).

Radosavljevic, M and Horner, R M W (2007). "Process planning methodology: dynamic short-term planning for off-site construction in Slovenia", Construction Management and Economics, Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 143-156.

Cuš Babic, N, Rebolj, D, Magdic, A, and Radosav1jevic, M (2003). "MC as a means for supporting information flow in construction processes", Concurrent engineering: research and applications, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp 37-46.

Radosavljevic, M and Horner, R M W (2002). "The evidence of complex variability in construction labour productivity", Construction Management and Economics, Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 3-12.

Refereed Conference Papers

Radosavljevic, M (2007). "How could construction supply chain benefit from RFID/GPS integration: A knowledge management perspective", CIB W102 3rd International Conference: Information and Knowledge Management - Helping the Practitioner in Planning and Building, 2007, 16-18 October, Stuttgart, Germany.

Radosavljevic, M (2007). "General Systems Perspective on Achieving Continuous Synergy in a Project Organisation", Construction Management and Economics: Past, Present and Future, 25th Anniversary of Construction Management and Economics Journal, 2007, 16-18 July, Reading, UK.

Radosavljevic, M (2007). "Promoting innovation and exceptional performance in the Scottish construction industry", 27th Conference on Entrepreneurship and Innovation, 2007, 21-22 March, Maribor, Slovenia.

Radosavljevic, M (2006). "The principles of ideactivity", Joint International Conference on Computing and Decision Making in Civil and Building Engineering 2006, 14-16 June, Montreal, Canada.

Radosavljevic, M (2005). "The process based short-term planning methodology as a tool for maintaining knowledge sustainability in the construction industry", CIBW102 Conference 2005, 19-20 May, Lisbon, Portugal.

Tibaut, A, Rebolj, D, Cuš Babic, N, Magdic, A, and Radosavljevic, M (2002). "Constructing collective knowledge", eWork and eBusiness in architecture, engineering and construction, pp 685-686, A. A. Balkema: Swets & Zeitlinger.

Rebolj, D, Cuš Babic, N, Tibaut, A, Magdic, A, and Radosavljevic, M (2002). "Mobile product models", eWork and eBusiness in architecture, engineering and construction, pp 637-638, A. A. Balkema: Swets & Zeitlinger.

Magdic, A, Rebolj, D, Cuš Babic, N, and Radosavljevic, M (2002). "Mobile computing in construction", Proceedings of the CIBW78 Conference 2002, 12-14 June, pp 29-36, Aarhus, Denmark.

Dauber, V F, Radosavljevic, M and Horner, R M W (2002). "Managing Flow: the way to innovative project management". Proceedings of the 2nd SENET Conference on Project Management, 17-19 April, pp 598-609, Cavtat, Croatia.

Qualifications:

U.D.I.G. (equivalent to I. Class BSc) - Faculty of Civil Engineering, University of Maribor, Slovenia
PhD (Fulton Prize for the best thesis of the year) - University of Dundee

MIZS, ICIOB