Liao, P-C (2008) Influence factors of engineering productivity and their impact on project performance. PhD thesis, University of Texas at Austin, USA.
Abstract
Effective management of engineering productivity is critical to achieving overall project success (CII 2001). Although engineering cost has approached to the level of 20 percent of a project's total cost on some industrial projects, engineering productivity is not well understood. For these reasons, the Construction Industry Institute (CII) developed an Engineering Productivity Measurement System (EPMS) that consists of quantity-based metrics to directly measure engineering productivity, and drive continuous performance improvement. However, barriers to system implementation exist. Productivity metrics in the EPMS are measured for various disciplines and thus evaluating overall productivity was initially difficult because of the lack of a summary metric. Because the EPMS is still new to the industry, limited understanding of its metrics has presented a challenge to gaining acceptance for its use in benchmarking. This has inhibited the realization of its potential for supporting improvement. Now that a dataset for the EPMS has been compiled, however, analyses can be performed to support research and the resulting findings will help to overcome implementation barriers of the EPMS. The author developed this research with data from the EPMS and input from industry. Feedback was collected in CII training sessions, committee meetings, and industry forums. The researcher undertook quantitative analyses using the EPMS data. The results will assist industry practitioners to effectively monitor and manage engineering process to reach project success. Four main objectives were achieved in this study: (1) discipline and project level indices to summarize engineering productivity were constructed; (2) influence factors as a foundation of engineering productivity improvement were identified; (3) discipline information dependencies were measured quantitatively; and (4) the associations between engineering productivity and project performance were documented.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Thesis advisor: | Thomas, S R and O'Brien, W |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | measurement; benchmarking; feedback; performance improvement; productivity; project success; training; project performance |
| Index terms: | practitioner, benchmarking, quantitative analysis, dataset, project success, Construction Industry Institute, productivity, project performance, performance improvement, implementation |
| Subjects: | research organizations, practitioner, data analysis and analytics, contractual arrangements, management, performance measurement, project management theory and practice, data management |
| Topics: | Digital Applications, Research Practice, Business Strategy, Roles and Professions, Quality Management, Project Management, Procurement |
| Descriptive scope: | 3 PCT |
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