Festschrift honouring Dr. Glenn Ballard

This Festschrift honours the seminal achievements of Dr. Glenn Ballard in academia and in construction practice. As an academic, Glenn is one of the most influential scholars in construction management, both a prolific writer and highly cited. As a practitioner, he has had enormous influence: management methods that he pioneered are in everyday use in construction projects throughout the world. Indeed, Glenn’s achievements are so significant that it is difficult to pinpoint any other person with greater influence on the theory and practice of construction management. Yet Glenn presents us with an enigma. We see few, if any, of the usual antecedents for an influential and impactful career in construction management: he has no formal education in construction management; he has not held a tenured position at a university; he has not had access to generous research funding; he has not held any influential position in a big organisation in which he might have trialled new ideas; and he has neither collected nor analysed large sets of empirical data. How, then, has he been able to gain insight and have a significant impact in academia and industry? First, instead of formal education in construction management, he gained first-hand experience and understanding of construction as a field worker on site and then breaking through to managerial positions. Second, instead of gaining formal academic standing, he has collaborated with both industryand academic peers and with numerous students to amplify intellectual efforts. Third, instead of relying on academic funding, he excelled at working with individuals and companies to carry out research in the field. Fourth, instead of influence within an organisation, he has turned to community building, both in research and in industry. Fifth, instead of seeing research as only data collection and analysis, his research is characterised by identifying and actively solving problems encountered in practice. The desire to celebrate Glenn’s accomplishments and honour his influence on our own work and that of so many others, came in anticipation of his 75th birthday celebration. As “plans are forecasts and forecasts are always wrong”—one of many of Glenn’s apt characterisations of the state of affairs—the Covid pandemic derailed our plan, and it is only now coming to realisation with this Festschrift. We start with a short biography. Short biography