Systematizing construction project evaluations

Abstract

Present trends toward multiparticipant megaprojects have heightened the need for effective and efficient evaluations by stakeholders, both of themselves and of fellow participants. Feedback from such evaluations helps improve the management of ongoing and oncoming projects. It also assists in a more objective selection of suitable organizational and/or individual participants for future projects, based on their past performance. However, a recent investigation indicated an apparent lack of systematic project evaluations in construction projects in particular. The need was noted to identify comprehensive sets of evaluation criteria, as well as to formulate sets of indicators corresponding to such criteria, by which performance may be evaluated. Data banks of typical values of such indicators in specific types of projects also needed to be developed for benchmarking. Although the development of such a framework may appear to be a formidable task, its feasibility and usefulness were demonstrated in a pilot exercise in Sri Lanka and the UK, as reported in this paper. One of the useful devices developed in this exercise was a "knowledge-based" or "expert system" front-end to select appropriate modules of the proposed evaluation system for a particular evaluation. Expert assessments of typical or average values of relevant indicators were also useful in the absence of adequate information to develop comprehensive data banks in certain project categories. Subjectivity in multicriteria assessments was reduced by pairwise comparisons as incorporated in the system proposed in this paper.