Towards change management capability assessment model for contractors in building project

Abstract

Project changes are inevitable and very common in all stages of design and construction. However, change is considered to be one of the prime risk factors causing projects’ failure and its consequences include cost overrun, schedule delays and quality defects. Moreover, existing studies have probe into identification of origin of change, causes of change, effects and management systems of change. Although, all the existing studies have provided effective process support, nevertheless, they do not provide clear evidence of the assessment and improvement of change management capability of contractors. This paper therefore seeks to develop a CMC assessment and improvement model as well as determining the present overall CMC of building contractors in Nigeria. 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 “socialisation” is relatively less matured than other capabilities. Therefore, the assessment of the current change management capability of building contractor can be adopted for pre-qualification exercise as well as identifying building contractor’s strength and weakness areas which improvements are to be prioritised.