The impacts of change management practices on project change cost performance

Abstract

Change cost is one of the most sensitive aspects of construction project management, but it is also one of the most difficult to control. It has been widely recognized that construction projects that adopt change management practices generally incur lower change costs in comparison with project budgets. The relationship between change management practices and cost performance is investigated. Construction project data for this research are derived from the Construction Industry Institute Benchmarking and Metrics database. Multiple one‐way ANOVA and linear regression are performed to investigate the effectiveness of individual change management practices elements and overall change management practices implementation in controlling project change cost, respectively. The data analysis results show that individual change management practices elements have different levels of leverage in helping to control project change cost and that using change management practices is truly helpful in lowering the proportion of change cost in project actual cost.

Keywords:

• Project management
• change management
• performance improvement

Notes

1. Statistically, the word correlation refers to the association between two variables. Here, it only indicates the statistical association or relation without emphasizing any logic and/or causal relationship. More explanation can be found in the Appendices.

2. This pre‐treatment is performed only if the statistical method chosen requires a parsimonious data category number. In some cases, retaining as much of the information from the data entering a model is of the utmost priority.

3. Some statisticians advocate using indicator variable instead of independent variable because these variables are not necessarily independent of one another in many cases; the same argument exists with regard to the use of response variable instead of dependent variable. In this paper, these are not strictly distinguished. Also, there are some other terms that should be deemed as synonyms in this article, such as continuous variable and interval variable.

4. Some scholars recommend a threshold such as 4/n or 4/(n‐k‐1), where n is sample size and k is the number of independent variables.

5. It is the power of significance test of r at α = 0.05 (two‐tailed).