Achieving high process capability maturity in construction organisations

A move towards a process based view has been noted as the way forward to achieve the desired performance improvements in the construction industry. It has further been recognised that, it is important for the organisations to possess appropriate process capability maturity to embark on successful process improvement initiatives to achieve desired performance improvements. With the success of the software industry's Capability Maturity Model (CMM), other industries have attempted to map the principles of CMM as a basis for process improvement initiatives within their respective settings. Construction is not an exception; the same has been attempted within the construction industry through a research collaboration between academia and industry, under the name of SPICE (Structured Process Improvements in Construction Enterprises). Being a stepwise improvement strategy, the CMM consists of five maturity levels, where the first three levels have been identified as low maturity levels, while levels four and five have been named as high maturity levels. While the low maturity levels lay the foundation for organisations to attain continuous improvements successfully, the practices of the high maturity levels deploy the process improvements required to achieve substantial performance boosts. Despite the fact that achieving high maturity levels is of utmost importance to achieve continuous improvements, up till now, only the low maturity level practices of CMM have been mapped within the context of construction organisations, leaving its true potential unexplored as a construction process improvement initiative. In the light of the above, this research aimed at mapping the practices of CMM high maturity levels to construction organisations to achieve high process capability maturity within construction organisations. This research has adopted the grounded theory and case studies as the primary research methods. It used the hermeneutic spiral approach to operationalise the research. Accordingly, the empirical investigation of this research consisted of two phases. The first phase is a series of expert interviews followed by two case studies conducted during the second phase of the study. Data analysis in this research was based on the coding, content analysis and cognitive mapping techniques. To assist with the data analysis and presentation