IMPROVEMENTS OF SMALL BUILDING CONSTRUCTION PROJECTS

Abstract

This thesis based on a company, which faced the problem in management of small building construction projects, which involve buildings with no more than four floors and construction budgets lower than 100 million baht. The entire project consists of several work areas and inter-independent activities. The performance of each activity depends on quality, budget and timing. This thesis aim to improve project management approach so that the project can proceed smoothly with time constraint, suitable budget and satisfactory quality. In this research, 10 projects taking place during 2006 to 2012 were studied. According to the historical data, it is noticed that many projects encountered several obstacles, such as poor project quality, high budget, and delay deliverables. However, it is obvious that the most common problem is delay deliverables which lead to over budget problem regarding to penalty and extra wage. To tackle the problem, Fishbone diagram, Pareto chart, and fault tree diagram were adopted in order to investigate the root causes of delay. Consequently, it found that the root causes of problem consist of inefficiency subcontractor, non-experience workers and inefficiency suppliers respectively. With the limitation of time, only inefficiency subcontractors and inefficiency supplier problem were examined in this study because over 55% of delay deliverable problem are caused by those problems. In order to tackle the problems and improve project management, three solutions are proposed; (1) Project management procedure and project management template (2) Decision Making criteria and/or decision-making process and (3) Outsources selection. From the simulation, a company applied the last two solutions in 6 previous projects with 184 activities; it obviously represents 16% of the different decision making of in-source or outsources, while 15% of activities are needed to review the new outsource or suppliers. Moreover, the first solution, project management procedure and template, was implemented in a new project. As a result, this project can be delivered on time under the satisfied quality. Furthermore, it gained more profit by 3.57%, due to lower material cost, and lower daily wage regarding to shorter working time of some in-house activities.