Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
D31PS
Unit 5 Performance Measurement and Benchmarking
Measuring Performance
Discussion Questions.
Traditional performance measures would involve financial assessments, for example the
profit levels achieved by construction companies.
For many years construction companies have been ranked in terms of the TOP 25
Contractors and these rankings might be based on a variety of data including turnover,
profitability, value of new contracts won, value of work in progress, numbers of
employees etc.
Construction Project Performance has also been measured for decades and we might
argue that Project Management as a discipline owes its existence, at least in part, to the
need to monitor actual progress against planned progress, using a variety of techniques
and tools. The project manager then exercises CONTROL based on that data.
Even if a project were performing well against its own targets that does not mean
that that project is a well performing project. All other projects (in the company or
in the industry) could well be performing in excess of your project.
Again, the key goal of measuring project, company and industry performance is to
achieve CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT, of the type suggested by Latham and
EGAN.
To assess how a project is performing against its targets and to capture performance data that can be
used to immediately improve the projects processes for the remainder of that project and for
subsequent projects.
To assess how well a project is performing in relation to other projects (is it performing better or
worse than the average).
To assess how well a company is performing in relation to competitor companies.
To assess how well an industry (or an industry sector) is performing.
Benchmarking
Internal Benchmarking
Project Benchmarking
External Benchmarking
KPIs have provided the UK Construction industry with a powerful tool that can
be used to assess the performance of a company or a project in relation to the
performance of peers.
However, the data that is produced will not necessarily achieve continuous
improvement.