THE IMPACT OF COORDINATION DISORDER AT THE TRADE LEVEL ON PROJECT PRODUCTIVITY: FOCUS ON THE CURTAIN WALL INSTALLATION

Abstract

While productivity is considered as the key source of growth and competitiveness of most economic sectors, the construction industry is currently suffering from low level of productivity. Despite numerous attempts to study the causes and their impacts on construction productivity, limited research has been conducted to identify the relationship between coordination and productivity. Realizing the lack of studies on such issue, this research aims to provide a comprehensive investigation into the impacts that coordination disorder may have on project productivity. However, the research only focuses on evaluating the influence of coordination at trade level, in which curtain wall installation is chosen to be studied. In other words, it will explore various coordination problems that can happen during curtain wall installation, and how they might affect project productivity using the unproductive time they result in. The research is developed through extensive literature review, survey questionnaire and interviews with experts from the local construction industry. A total of 6 coordination problems arising out of the curtain wall installation process are identified through these sources. Subsequently, statistical analysis is performed to determine the most common problems resulting in unproductive time, as well as to explore the relationship between these problems and project productivity. An important finding from the analysis is that total project unproductive time does have a significant impact on project productivity. Furthermore, the analysis reveals that coordination problems in curtain wall installation, when evaluated as a whole, also affect project productivity. Nevertheless, when measuring the impact of separate curtain wall coordination issues on project productivity, no significant relationship is found. The results of this research will shed light on possible coordination issues that result from the curtain wall installation process, thus assisting practitioners to tailor more concrete measures to tackle those issues and reduce unproductive time. Furthermore, with the establishment of quantitative relationships between project productivity and unproductive time as well as curtain wall coordination problems, they can be used as productivity benchmarks for a specific construction project. More importantly, such finding opens up many opportunities for future research to explore in-depth the impacts of coordination disorder on project productivity in relation with more critical trades, such as building structure, or from the perspective of total project level.