Evaluating Cost and Time Performance of Sri Lankan Construction Projects

Cost overruns and schedule delays are two of the common issues facing the Sri Lankan construction industry. Hence, managing these aspects of performance, i.e., cost and time predictability, is of high importance. Performance measurement is considered by many to be the first step of performance management. While much of the global and some of the local research work have focused on developing tools or indicators for performance measurement, not many studies have been done on developing methodologies to interpret their results. In this study, suitable key performance indicators were identified from the literature review, and performance benchmarks for these KPIs applicable to the local construction industry were developed using data from twelve recently completed projects. Thereby, five levels of performance from ‘Unsatisfactory’ to ‘Excellent’ and corresponding scores from 0-10 were defined. These KPIs were applied to two ongoing projects for a period of 8-9 months which helped not only to demonstrate the use of the performance indicators and intervals, but also to discover a few performance issues present and the reasons. It is expected that the tools developed in this paper will help elevate the levels of performance of construction projects in the country by facilitating continuous measurement and evaluation.