Developing change management capability maturity framework for assessing and improving contarcting organization's cost performance in building projects

Abstract

The fragmentation of design and construction process has made project changes and change orders almost inevitable situation in construction projects. Common consequences of changes include time and cost overruns, quality defects, conflict and safety issues. Hence, the need to assess the management capability maturity of contracting organizations in managing project changes has largely come into focus. The idea behind this is to improve organization’s performance in terms of cost overrun reduction in construction projects. Therefore, this paper presents a change management capability maturity framework for assessing and improving contracting organization’s capability in dealing with contract changes. Based on review of literature, a survey approach that adopts questionnaire survey mechanism for data collection and a fuzzy synthetic evaluation technique was used. Hence, a change management capability maturity assessment framework is developed by adopting capability maturity model (CMM) principles. The framework defines three basic components of; determining the overall change management capability maturity level (CMCML); establishment of relationship between CMCML and cost overrun, and general review of organization’s performance for continuous improvement. The overall CMCML is found to be ‘matured’ and inversely related to cost; an indication that cost overrun is having significant impact on CMCML (increase in CMCML with associated cost overrun reduction). It is concluded that the framework is suitable for contracting organizations to assess their performance in terms of their capability in dealing with the problem of project changes together with its attendance consequence of cost overrun.