New Boundary Spanners: Emerging Management Roles in Collaborative Construction Projects

Project management rolesand functions, which are standardized and clearly defined in literature, vary in practice.This study explores project management roles and functions in collaborative construction project practice.The findings, which are based on a longitudinal case study of a collaborative construction project, reports thatseveral project management roles emerged during the project process, for example collaboration manager, BIM-manager and cooperation manager.The findings also report associated risks with the emergence of new management roles, for example information overload and misunderstanding. These new managerial roles served both as boundary spanners when creating and maintaining relationships between stakeholders, and as innovators when challengingthe traditional and ingrainedadversarial construction project practice.The findings contribute to the growing literature on collaborative approaches in construction and to the discussion on the transformation of project management roles and functions.