Full Project – AN ASSESSMENT OF THE NIGERIAN CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY’S READINESS TO ADOPT VALUE MANAGEMENT PROCESS IN EFFECTIVE PROJECT DELIVERY

Value management is widely accepted as a technique in achieving value for money. In accordance with the stipulation of the Public Procurement Act in Nigeria that value for money practices should be followed in procuring public assets and services, this study aims to assess the Nigerian construction industry’s readiness to adopt value management process. Through a survey, a total number of 117 semi-structured questionnaires were administered amongst practicing quantity surveying firms involved in construction projects in Nigeria. A total number of 70 usable responses were analysed and the results evaluated based on the four aspects (environment, people, process, and issues/information) of the requirements for value management identified from literature. Descriptive analysis was used to determine the level of existence of the requirements in the industry using percentages, mean and standard deviation. The results reveal that the Nigerian construction industry can adopt value management with little adjustments to current practice with the overall mean for all the four aspects standing at 3.34 (i.e. moderate level). The findings also revealed that the key barriers to the adoption of value management are lack of value management qualified practitioners, lack of commitment to implement value management, lack of time due to rushed designs and difficulties in the involvement of all key stakeholders in project processes. This calls for efforts to be geared towards mitigating these barriers. Therefore, the study recommends that there is the need for adequate awareness on the benefits of value management to all stakeholders. Also, Organisations should review their techniques and processes from time to time for improvement and also put in place a change management strategy that would enhance adoption of newly introduced techniques like value management.

Value management practice is not new; its origin could be traced back to the days

of World War II when it was introduced into the American manufacturing industry even though it was then referred to as Value Engineering (Cheah and Ting, 2005). Value Engineering was introduced to the construction industry by the United States Department of Defense and Navy in 1960. According to Kelly et al (2004), value management practice has been adopted by several countries including United Kingdom, China and Australia. Value management is a structured, organized team approach to identifying the functions of a project, product, or service with recognized techniques and providing the necessary functions to meet the required performance at the lowest overall cost (SAVE International, 2001). Although some schools of thoughts tend to distinguish value management from other relevant terms such as value engineering and value analysis, it is more widely accepted that the term value management can be used to represent other related value methodologies (Shen and Liu, 2003).

The construction industry plays a vital role in Nigeria’s economic growth and development. It is also responsible for a large portion of total fixed capital investments (Omole, 2000). However, the Nigerian construction industry can easily be described as the ‘sleeping giant’ within its continental neighborhood in terms of service delivery and satisfying the needs of its clients (Kolo and Ibrahim, 2010). The Nigerian Construction Industry is also responsible for employing approximately 8 million people, having a population of approximately 140 million and this represents approximately 20% of

Nigeria’s workforce (National Bureau of Statistics, 2006 cited in Kolo and Ibrahim, 2010), perhaps, making it the largest employer of construction labour in Africa.