ASSESSMENT OF TRENDS OF CONSTRUCTION PROJECT QUALITY BASED ON CONQUAS SCORES

Abstract

The Building and Construction Authority (BCA) has put in place many measures to improve construction project quality. However, it remains unclear if these measures have improved construction quality to a significant extent. Moreover, the recent trends in construction quality remains unclear. Furthermore, a lack of knowledge of the characteristics of projects with high construction quality has prevented firms from benchmarking their performance in relation to their competitors. Based on the research problems, the research has four objectives: (i) Identify the trends of CONQUAS scores (overall, Structural, Architectural and M&E) over the years; (ii) Investigate whether construction quality of projects in Singapore has improved over the years; (iii) Determine the association between Structural, Architectural and M&E scores and overall CONQUAS scores; and (iv) Examine the characteristics of projects with high quality and low CONQUAS scores. A literature review was done to ascertain the definition of quality, recognizing quality, and measuring quality. After which, CONQUAS data from BCA were analysed with the SPSS software. Through ANOVA and independent samples ttests, it was found that CONQUAS improved over the recent years and there were significant differences between the scores of 2013 and 2017 and between characteristics of high and low quality projects. Furthermore, Pearson’s correlation test found that significant positive correlations between all individual components that make up the overall CONQUAS scores. Projects with high quality have these characteristics: being private projects in general, constructed by foreign contractors and have high financial classification.