Housing design performance: How is it measured?

Industrialisation involves reoccurring tasks and interfaces, which enables companies to work with continuous improvements of the process. In order to determine the effects of undertaken measures as well as enhance the manageability of the process, it is important to find measurements for effectiveness and efficiency of the construction design process. The aim of this paper is to serve as a gap analysis regarding the differences between current practice and the characteristics of performance measurement found in literature. This study is based on interviews with middle-managers at six industrial housing companies and four construction engineering consultant firms in Sweden, in order to explore the current methods of performance measuring in the construction design phase. The result shows that the studied companies currently have a limited use of measures and that the present measurements do not serve as a means of control for the design process or enable follow ups of undertaken improvements. For extended control and continuous improvement of the design process additional methods for measuring are required.