Case Studies in Construction Process Improvement

Construction industry reports by Latham [1994] and more recently Sir John Egan [1998], have highlighted the need for the construction industry to increase productivity, improve quality and reduce defects. In particular, the Egan report urged the industry to focus on construction processes as route to these improvements. However, the industry has not had a recognised framework or methodology to base a process improvement initiative on. SPICE is a current research project that is developing an evolutionary step-wise process improvement framework for the construction industry. The research has drawn specifically on the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) which has been used successfully in the IT sector by clients for supplier assessment and by suppliers for process improvement. This paper begins by introducing the SPICE concepts and research to-date which has investigated the validity of the framework and the suitability of the assessment. The paper then goes on to describe four case studies that have been conducted as part of the research.