ABSTRACT
Construction projects significantly affect a country's development, consume many resources, and impact many stakeholders. Project sustainability requirements are essential to overcome the current social and environmental challenges, yet entrepreneurs, decision-makers, and technical professionals still ignore them. This research aims to reveal the leading players that can influence implementing sustainability requirements in construction project development, the barriers, and possible solutions. The results show that organizational strategies, maturity level in sustainability, and the ability to change corporate values and beliefs play a significant role in this pivotal movement. At the same time, a set of external stakeholders, such as investors, banks, communities, suppliers, regulatory agencies, and insurance companies, may push a specific behavior to the market and influence change. On top of this, organizations shall build their strategy toward sustainability and implement sustainable project management. This study employs the Complex Holographic Assessment of Paradoxical Problems (CHAP2) to investigate the current situation in Brazil related to the integration of construction project development and sustainability requirements.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic required managerial and structural changes inside hospitals to address new admission demands, frequently reducing their care capacity for other diseases. In this regard, this study aims to support the recovery of hospital productivity in the post-pandemic context. The major challenge will be to make use of all the resources the institution has obtained (equipment, beds, temporarily hired human resources) and to increase production to meet the existing repressed demand. To support evidence-based decision-making at a major university hospital in Rio de Janeiro, hospital managers and operations research analysts designed an approach based on multiple methodologies. Besides multimethodology, one important novelty of this study is the application of a productivity frontier function to future scenario planning through the quantitative DEA methodology. Concept maps were used to structure the problem and emphasize stakeholders' perspectives. In sequence, data envelopment analysis (DEA) was applied, as it combines benchmarking best practices and assigns weights to inputs and outputs. To guarantee that the efficiency measurement considers all inputs and outputs before any inclusion of expert judgment, the scope was redirected to full dimensional efficient facet, if any, or to maximum efficient faces. The results indicate that production scenarios proposed by stakeholders based on the Ministry of Health parameters overestimate the viable production framework and that the scenario that maintains temporary human resource contracts is more compatible with quality in health provision, teaching, and research. These findings will serve as a basis for decision-making by the governmental agency that provided temporary contracts. The present methodology can be applied in different settings and scales.
ABSTRACT
The integration of quantitative indicators with qualitative descriptions of context is a noticeable demand from many different scientific disciplines, since it contributes to linking theoretical and practical approaches to problem solving. Amongst them are the problem structuring methods, systems thinking and multimethodology. This work presents a mixed quantitative and qualitative methodological approach to aid formulation and structuring of performance measurement of health care in 5565 Brazilian municipalities. Data mining and data envelopment analysis (DEA) are applied in the context of conceptual mapping, thus shedding light on both quantitative and qualitative factors that influence health performance. Our aim is to propose a methodology for performance indicators to support health care policy making in Brazil, using quantitative indicators. However, the approach does not lose track of the role of important qualitative factors in the attribution of meaning to performance assessments. The methodological and analytical results can strengthen mutual understanding by analysts and stakeholders of the problem at hand. Quantitative results allow inefficient municipalities to understand the causes of their overall efficiency in terms of particular low partial DEA efficiencies combined with high deathrates.
