Case based reasoning for eliciting knowledge for the implementation of project management plan of successful building projects in Beijing, China

Abstract

China?s construction industry size is huge and rapidly increasing. Numerous successful projects are emerging. Construction Ministry of China promulgated annual prestigious construction project awards, Luban and Great Wall Prizes. The aim of this study is to examine the project success from the Luban and Great Wall prizes? projects. In order to achieve the research aim, two research objectives are established. The first research objective is to adopt the completed project data to build the model, which has been given the name as CASE_PMP. In the existing literature, project success has a set of quantitative indicators, namely, project success Key Performance Indicators (KPI), and correspondingly the determinants, namely, Critical Success Factors (CSF). And the second objective is to use CASE_PMP to estimate the project time and cost to prepare the tender document. In order to accomplish the research objectives, a three-step research method is formulated. The first step is to establish the sampling method for data collection. The second step is to build the CBR model. One hundred and four Luban and Great Wall prize projects? data have been collected in Beijing China to build the CBR model. The model is tested by the average error rate and the average deviation, 4.35% and 3.00%respectively. After verification and validation, the weights of CSFs generated from the model are analysed as the preliminary results. The third step is to conduct a semi-structured interview to expand the discussion of the results.The interview is conducted to ask practitioners on their opinions of the most important CSFs as selected by the weights which have been ranked top five and to discuss the usage, advantage, disadvantage of CASE_PMP. Some significant CSFs identified, such as the system to ensure achievement of quality objective, planning (schedule effectiveness), and project contract, are in compliance with the interviews results. Four out of five respondents asserted that CASE_PMP is useful to estimate the project time and cost for tendering purpose by automating the traditional estimation method, i.e. project manager and marketing department do the manual estimation.