SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY

Professor Albert CHAN is currently PolyU's Dean of Students, Associate Director of Research Institute for Sustainable Urban Development, Able Professor in Construction Health and Safety, and Chair Professor of Construction Engineering and Management. He earned his MSc degree in Construction Management and Economics from the University of Aston in Birmingham, and PhD degree in Project Management from the University of South Australia. Before joining the Department of Building and Real Estate of PolyU in 1996, Professor CHAN taught at the University of South Australia as a Senior Lecturer and Vice Dean of the School of Building and Planning. He was appointed by PolyU as Associate Dean (Teaching) of the Department of Building and Real Estate from 2005 to 2011, Associate Dean from 2011 to 2013, Interim Dean of the Faculty of Construction and Environment from 2013 to 2014, and Dean of the Department of Building and Real Estate from 2015 to 2021. He has been an Adjunct Professor in a number of Mainland and overseas universities.

A chartered construction manager, engineer, project manager and surveyor by profession, Professor CHAN is devoted to a myriad of research subjects as varied as project management and project success, construction procurement and relational contracting, public private partnerships, and construction health and safety, as manifested by his prolific research output of over 1,000 refereed journal papers, international refereed conference papers, consultancy reports, and other articles. Besides being an expert member of the Engineering Panel of the Research Grants Council, HKSAR from 2015 to 2021, Professor CHAN also served as an expert member in the Built Environment Panel of FORMAS, Swedish Research Grants Council, and the Faculty of Architectural and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. Professor CHAN was ranked among the Top 2% of Scientists in the World for five years in a row starting in 2020, according to a study by a group of scholars in Stanford University. He was ranked 24th in the Subject Field of Building and Construction in the World in 2024. Professor CHAN received the Medal of Honour (M.H.) from the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative on 1 July 2024 in recognition of his contributions in the construction policy research and in nurturing young talents to join the construction industry.  

BRIEF INTRODUCTION

The title of presentation is "Monitoring hospital cost performance through a Project Surveillance System (PSS)". Hospital projects stand out from other types of construction projects due to their unique characteristics and features. Hospital project development faces several challenges due to quickly changing user needs, diverse healthcare regulation frameworks, and procedural complexity. To maintain high success rates, it is necessary to support project management efforts and decisions with proper monitoring and control technologies. This study creates a cashflow model to assess hospital project performance in Hong Kong's construction industry. The normalization and percentile techniques were used to analyse monthly cashflow data from public hospital projects over the last 20 years and build the model. The model warns for three categories of project performance: green (normal), yellow, and red. It aids in anticipating existing or possible issues in ongoing hospital projects and providing early warning signals that allow corrective actions to be implemented successfully and timely. This work adds to the Project Management Body of Knowledge by creating a paradigm to improve hospital project delivery. This presentation was supported by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and the Research Grants Council (RGC) of the Hong Kong SAR, and it is part of a broader study entitled "Developing a computerized project success index system to monitor and benchmark the performance of hospital projects" (RGC General Research Fund: 15205421).