A Systematic Change Management Capability Maturity Assessment Framework for Contracting Organizations

Abstract

The complexity of construction projects coupled with the fragmentation of design and construction process made it to be affected by varied factors that trigger project changes which incorporate risks of cost and time overruns, conflict, and quality defects. Hence the need for a pragmatic approach that will provide systematic assessment of the management capability maturity in order to mitigate the deleterious effects of project changes. This paper therefore presents a change management capability maturity assessment framework for contracting organizations. The paper describes the development process of a fuzzy synthetic evaluation based framework, including its contents and validation. The framework has five capability areas of; leadership; application; competencies; standardization; and socialization. These attributes are measured against five levels namely: Absent/adhoc; isolated project; multiple projects; organizational standard; and organizational competency. The research adopted survey approach that uses questionnaire survey as data collection mechanism. Adopting normalization method and fuzzy synthetic evaluation method as quantitative data analysis technique, it is found that the weakest capability area is ‘socialization’; followed by ‘application’ of standardized change management process. It is also found that the overall change management capability maturity level (CMCML) was ‘moderate’ (3.29). Furthermore, the research finding shows that the proposed framework is users’ friendly, comprehensive and easily comprehensible. Finally, the research concluded that the proposed framework is suitable for contracting organizations to individually assess their CMCML and find ways for continuous improvement based on lessons learned.