Stirring the construction project management with co-creation and continuous improvement

Gathering information that is capable to explain customers' needs is usually seen as a quite straightforward part of the traditional construction process: a customer should be able to tell all relevant needs in the first stage so that a building could be designed and built according to the gained information. But the process is lacking of service abilities if a customer wants to modify the given information due to a change in circumstances, albeit such a change is easily caused due turbulent economic situations and long spans in real-estate development projects. Hence the customer perspective regarding the construction management (CM) process should be accommodated better. In this paper, the case studies of the four premises improvement projects are reported upon, where the CM process was altered to include and apply the concepts of continuous improvement and co-creation. The process documentation covered the impacts of the case project on the usability of the premises, the indoor climate conditions (carbon dioxide and temperature) metering, the time lapse cameras and the on-line user feedback system. The documentation consists of the minutes of the meetings, the financial reporting and the time tables. Both the processes and the results of the projects are analysed. Based on the key findings, some suggestions are put forth upon how to improve the CM process to better serve customer interests and quality improvement in the future. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B. V.