Improving building project performance: how buildability benchmarking can help

Abstract

Although the buildability of building designs has not been commonly taken as an important parameter in design quality assessment, previous studies have linked buildability to time, cost, quality and safety performance in many ways. Based on this observation, the question arises of how buildability can be benchmarked and which aspects of project performance can be improved. After identifying available benchmarking tools, the relative correlations are investigated between different buildability attributes and construction performance in terms of time, cost, quality and safety. Based on a questionnaire survey, it was found that construction time performance has strong positive correlations with buildability in the design of external wall elements, simplicity of assembly and installation considerations, while other design attributes affect cost, quality and safety performance to varying degrees. With this understanding, it is postulated that best practice can be promoted among design teams for enhancing buildability, which would in turn raise project performance. Three experienced practitioners have been interviewed for verifying the practicality of buildability benchmarking. As an incentive to improve buildability, benchmarking would help construction stakeholders reap their desired benefits by focusing on the related design attributes in the pre‐construction stage, particularly for functionally oriented buildings.

Keywords:

• Buildability
• project performance
• benchmarking
• best practice

Acknowledgement

The work described in this paper was fully supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (RGC Project No. PolyU5155/04E).