International Construction Specialty Conference of the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering (ICSC) (5th : 2015)

Implementation of construction industry best practices into workflow management systems Golzarpoor, Behrooz; Haas, Carl T.

Abstract

Several research studies have confirmed that identification and adoption of industry best practices drive performance improvements in terms of cost, schedule, and productivity. Best practices specifications facilitate the reuse of experience within a domain. However, they typically offer abstract suggestions and recommendations that include not only explicit, but also tacit knowledge. Key approaches of adopting and promoting best practices include socialization and face to face interactions, such as meetings, workshops, and training. These approaches, however, are not easily scalable to large capital projects, to provide systematic and consistent adoption of best practices throughout different phases of a project or among different projects. An alternative solution is to transform best practices into processes implementable into workflow management systems. In this paper, well-known best practices in the domain of the construction industry and their common characteristics are investigated. A framework is then established for transforming best practices into structured processes implementable into workflow management systems. Only parts of a best practice can be transformed into a structured process. The proposed framework describes which components of a best practice are more suitable for this transformation. The result is a process with the essence of a best practice that can be embedded into and automated through workflow management systems. This approach of integrating construction industry best practices into workflow management systems, not only facilitates consistent implementation of best practices throughout the project lifecycle and within projects, but also improves conformance to those practices, with the end result of improved capital project performance.

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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada