Development of research instrument for project managers' performance measures in mass house building projects

The choice and design of an appropriate research instrument (RI) marks an important milestone in any research programme. Here, the development of an appropriate RI towards project managers' (PMs) performance measures in mass house building projects (MHBPs) is described. The underlying conceptual framework is designed to reflect the various project phases, namely: conceptual, planning, tender, procurement, construction and operational. However, here, the RI is developed for only the construction phase. Adopting positivism, the dependent and independent variables have been operationalised to reflect repetitive management intuition in MHBPs. Given that the RI is to be applied in the context of a developing country, the operational measures have also been developed to reflect the appropriate project conditions prevailing. Subsequently, pilot study was undertaken in Ghana, a sub-Saharan African (SSA) country. The feedback suggests the RI is potentially rigorous for eliciting the relevant information. While the paper focuses on MHBPs, there are useful lessons for application in the wider context, in particular, towards mapping performance measures onto projects of unique characteristics.