Content area
Abstract
The pressures to adapt to change are as high in the construction industry as in any other industry. The literature review highlighted the main challenges facing the industry at present e.g. fragmentation and adversarial relations. To say that the industry has made no attempt to tackle the problems is misleading. Numerous initiatives were established in the wake of the Latham (1994; 2001) and Egan reports (1998). Whilst admirable, the initiatives are not designed to tackle problems associated with the business level, for example poor business management processes. In the author's view greater attention needs to be paid to resolving the problems that are within the control of the organisations, namely those at the business level because improvements in efficiency nada the way that they operate as businesses have the potential to improve the way the way that they interact and operate at the project level (the business and project levels do not operate in isolation and the problems associated with one level can have an impact upon and affect the other). The literature review highlighted the low level of research in the field of business process improvement in relation to construction supply chain organisations. In light of the need for change and the gap in existing knowledge, the research focused on investigating whether construction organisations have a verifiable change process (determined via process mapping), investigating the management of the pillars of change management (factors that support the change process) and the development of a model to assess change capability. The findings demonstrated that the case study organisations do have a verifiable change process but none recognised the need to incorporate the pillars into the process.