The Impacts of Change Management Practices on Project...

Construction Management and Economics (April 2008) 26, 387–393 The impacts of change management practices on project change cost performance YI ZOU1 and SANG-HOON LEE2* 1 2 FMC Technologies Inc., Houston, USA Department of Engineering Technology, University of Houston, 304A Technology Bldg, University of Houston, Houston 77204, USA Received 18 June 2007; accepted 15 January 2008 Change cost is one of the most sensitive aspects of construction project management, but it is also one of the most difficult to control. It has been widely recognized that construction projects that adopt change management practices generally incur lower change costs in comparison with project budgets. The relationship between change management†¦show more content†¦Table 1 illustrates the demographic composition of the BMM database based on respondent type, project nature and industrial group. As can be seen in Table 1, most of the projects are in the heavy industry sector. Such an extremely uneven sample population distribution poses difficulty in the subsequent data analyses, and it is therefore one of the primary considerations when the analysis techniques are selected. Appendix II presents the 14 questions used in this research. Zou and Lee of projects (Construction Industry Institute, 2003). With all of these considerations, this research only focuses on the impacts of change management practice on project change cost performance. Research objectives It is worth noting that this research is to be explanatory instead of confirmative or predictive. In other words, the purpose of this research is to reveal potential correlations1 among project characteristics, change management practice and project change cost performance. The two main objectives of this research are (1) to investigate the effectiveness of individual change management practice elements in terms of improving project change cost performance—e.g. for a particular change management practice element, could the construction project using it have a high probability of