DBAX 9101 Week 2 Problem Candidates Comparison Example

Five Problems on the Table and One Kept: Comparing Candidate Business Problems for a Doctoral Study by Cost, Evidence, Access and Fit With a Practitioner's Position in Specialty Contracting

Student Name

Walden University

DBAX 9101: Business Research Project Stage 1

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Five Problems on the Table and One Kept: Comparing Candidate Business Problems for a Doctoral Study by Cost, Evidence, Access and Fit With a Practitioner's Position in Specialty Contracting

Why Compare Candidates

The first problem a doctoral student thinks of is usually the one closest to their frustration, which is not always the one best suited to a study. This paper lists five candidate business problems, three noticed in my own practice as an estimator at a mechanical subcontractor and two drawn from reading, and compares them on four criteria before choosing one.

The Criteria

The first criterion is cost: does the problem cost a definable group of firms money, and can that cost be described? The second is evidence: is there published work showing the problem exists beyond my own experience? The third is access: could I reach the people who hold knowledge about the problem and the documents that would show it? The fourth is a gap in practice: do some firms appear to manage the problem better than others, so that a study of their strategies could help the rest?

The Candidates

Table 1

Five Candidate Problems Compared

Judgments are the author's, based on the reading cited and twelve years in the industry.

Reading the Comparison

Retainage is a real cost, but much of it is fixed by contract and law, leaving little room for owner strategy; it is better treated as one part of the late payment problem. Estimator turnover matters to me personally, but I found little construction-specific research on it, and a study would have to build its evidence base from nothing. Bid accuracy is interesting but hard to observe without access to many firms' bid files, which owners guard closely. Labor shortages are costly and well documented, but they affect every firm in a region at once, so studying one firm's strategies would explain little.

Late payment scores well on all four criteria. Peters et al. (2019) describe how payment delays move down from owners to general contractors to subcontractors, and Arditi and Chotibhongs (2005), surveying contractors and subcontractors, found payment practices among the main sources of friction between them. The cost is visible in firms' receivables. Owners are reachable through the regional chapter of a contractors' association where I already know several members. And in my own market, some small firms have survived years of slow payment while others closed, which suggests that strategies differ.

A Check on My Own Bias

My position at a mechanical subcontractor gives me easy access but also a stake. I have argued with general contractors over late pay applications, and I could favor the candidate that matches my grievances. To test that, I asked a colleague who works for a general contractor to rank the five candidates on the same criteria. She also placed late payment first, though she described it as a cash planning problem on both sides rather than a fault of general contractors. That framing will be useful later, because it reminds me that the general contractor is often waiting on the owner too.

The Choice

I will pursue late payment from general contractors to small specialty trade subcontractors. The working problem is that some owners of these firms lack strategies to manage late payment and sustain their businesses. Retainage will be folded in as one form of delay.

What the Choice Commits Me To

Choosing this problem commits me to studying owners' strategies rather than changing the law or the contracts. Ramachandra and Rotimi (2015), studying payment problems in New Zealand construction, found that many arose from conditions outside subcontractors' control, such as clients' cash shortages. My study must take that seriously: some of what owners face may not be manageable, and the study should be honest about which parts are.

What I Set Aside

The other four candidates are not abandoned. Retainage enters the chosen study as a subset of delay. Estimator turnover and bid accuracy may become future projects. Writing them down keeps me from drifting back to them when the chosen problem becomes difficult.

References

Arditi, D., & Chotibhongs, R. (2005). Issues in subcontracting practice. Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 131(8), 866-876. https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)0733-9364(2005)131:8(866)

Peters, E., Subar, K., & Martin, H. (2019). Late payment and nonpayment within the construction industry: Causes, effects, and solutions. Journal of Legal Affairs and Dispute Resolution in Engineering and Construction, 11(3), Article 04519013. https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)LA.1943-4170.0000314

Ramachandra, T., & Rotimi, J. O. B. (2015). Causes of payment problems in the New Zealand construction industry. Construction Economics and Building, 15(1), 43-55. https://doi.org/10.5130/AJCEB.v15i1.4214