Drawing on Concepts in Finance for Construction Schedule Performance Measurement

该项目的研究目标是调查如何在各种建筑项目规模和类型上进行绩效比较。绩效是决策者所有管理职能的核心；规划项目应该如何进展，控制项目的执行情况，并在必要时部署补救措施，使落后的项目重回正轨。然而，尽管建筑业是整体经济的主要贡献者，其项目数量众多，种类繁多，尽管如此，也可能是因为建筑业的规模，没有一项措施能提供如此理想的快速评估。现有的尝试只是提供总工作量的百分比或引用时间表或预算已经实现的“价值”，在概念上存在这样的问题：它们在项目结束时收敛到“1”(已完成的工作量)或“0”(剩余的工作量)，因此，仅仅是它最终完成的事实就会使项目看起来很成功，而发生的任何问题都被遗忘了。这给出了一种过于乐观、不完整和不可预测的观点。因此，这项研究将从金融学中获得灵感。在金融学中，尽管上市公司的性质多种多样，但投资者长期以来一直使用通用指标量化股票表现。具体地说，将探索已证实的“贝塔”概念，即表示股票相对于其市场的波动性，以适应作为时间表业绩指标的情况。如果成功，这项研究将提高建设项目的透明度，以应对仍然过于普遍的进度延误和生产率不足，使表现不佳的活动、项目或公司能够得到识别和有针对性的改进，并支持参与者在美国建筑业经济中的竞争力。课后ACE导师计划的教育推广服务于许多少数族裔高中生，将建立一个小组活动，有趣地体现研究的见解。研究方法是一个知识转移的过程，从概念提取到适应到验证和确认步骤。研究小组将通过将类比映射到概念矩阵中并将其与项目管理的等价物进行匹配来整理类比。纳入的标准和任何调整、假设或限制将是在意义上的接近和对创建能够反映进度绩效的功能模型的预见性。验证新方法将使用对企业合作伙伴的人工和现实世界时间表的统计分析。

The research objective of this project is to investigate how performance can be made comparable across a wide range of construction project sizes and types. Performance is at the core of all managerial functions of decision makers; planning how projects should progress, controlling how they perform, and, if necessary, deploying remedies to bring lagging ones back on track. Yet despite, or perhaps because of the size of the construction industry as being a major contributor to the overall economy, its enormous number of projects, and their variety, no single measure has emerged that provides such a desired snapshot assessment. Existing attempts, which simply provide the percentage of total work or cite the 'value' that a schedule or budget has achieved, conceptually suffer from the problem that they converge to 'one' (work completed) or 'zero' (work remaining) at the project end, so that the mere fact that it was eventually finished makes a project appear successful and any problems that occurred are forgotten. This gives an overly optimistic, incomplete, and non-predictive view. This research will therefore glean inspiration from finance, where notwithstanding the diverse nature of publicly traded companies, investors have long quantified stock performance with universal metrics. Specifically, the proven concept of 'beta', which expresses volatility of a stock compared to its market, will be explored for adaptation as a schedule performance metric. If successful, this research will enhance transparency of construction projects in light of still-too-common schedule delays and productivity shortfalls, enable identification and targeted improvements of underperforming activities, projects, or firms, and support the competitiveness of participants within the U.S. construction economy. Educational outreach at the after-school ACE mentor program, which serves many minority high school students, will build a group activity that playfully embodies insights from the research.The research methodology is a process of knowledge transfer, from concept extraction via adaptation to verification and validation steps. The research team will collate analogies by mapping and matching them in a concept matrix with their equivalents of project management. Criteria for inclusion and any adjustment, assumption, or limitation will be proximity in meaning and predictiveness toward creating a functioning model that can reflect schedule performance. Validating the new approach will employ statistical analysis of artificial and real-world schedules from corporate partners.