Assessing CII Best Practices Applicability

Abstract

The Construction Industry Institute (CII) has developed 14 Best Practices to assist its membership with improving project and organizational performance. These Best Practices are widely used throughout the engineering and construction industries. Understanding that project needs and methods may differ widely across major industry sectors, four indicators have been developed as a way to measure how applicable CII research and practices are to four major industry sectors – Buildings, Infrastructure, Heavy Industrial and Light Industrial. An indicator of applicability was defined as a characteristic that can be used as a measure of how functional a Best Practice is to different industry sectors based on that characteristic. The concept was tested on the CII Best Practices to assess the extent of applicability to the four major industry sectors and project types. The main objective of this paper is to describe the research methodology and in particular the development of the applicability measures. These measures were used to assess applicability of 13 CII best practices following a three phase data collection approach. This research methodology proved useful in identifying gaps in applicability between the four industry sectors.