Understanding and improving change management capability : assessment model for contractors in building projects

Abstract

In construction projects, change is considered to be one of the major risk factors and its consequences include, time and cost overruns disputes, safety issues, and quality defects. However, previous researchers have probe into identification of causes, effects, and management systems of change and their findings have helped to mitigate the occurrence of the effects of changes. Contractor’s high change management capability maturity level is an indication of contractor’s proper understanding of the change problems and how to manage them. This paper seeks to develop a change management capability assessment model for building contractors in Nigeria. The research used five attributes of; leadership, application, competencies, standardisation and socialisation to test the different aspects of contractor’s change management capability. A questionnaire survey was conducted with relevant contractors in the south-western part of Nigeria using fuzzy synthetic evaluation method for analysis. The empirical survey findings reveal that the overall change management capability maturity of building contractors can be considered to be “Moderate” at 3.29. Moreover, the building contractor’s present change management capability in leadership is more matured than other capabilities. Consequently, contractor’s capability in socialization is relatively less matured than other capabilities. Therefore, the assessment of the current change management capability of building contractor can be adopted for identifying building contractor’s strength and weakness areas which improvements are to be prioritized.