How to Double Productivity

The Construction Industry Institute's Downstream & Chemicals Sector Committee asked one audacious question: how do you double the productivity of industrial construction? As a Graduate Research Assistant on Research Team DCC-01, I helped turn that question into an evidence-based research roadmap, working with my PhD advisor Dr. Paul Goodrum.

We started by looking outside our own industry. Across two innovation workshops and a series of interviews, we pulled ideas from heart surgeons, automotive engineers, theme-park designers, brewers, logistics executives, and neuroscientists — anyone whose field had cracked a productivity problem construction hadn't. That produced 111 raw ideas, which we classified into five categories and condensed to 29 candidate research topics.

To rank those topics without letting the loudest voice in the room decide, we ran a structured Delphi study with an 11-member expert panel — collectively 282 years of construction experience — using Express Delphi, a web app I built to run the rounds live. Over four rounds the panel scored every topic against five weighted criteria and reached 100% consensus on all 145 ratings. We then plotted each topic by feasibility and impact, and corrected for a familiarity bias we caught in the data so that promising-but-unfamiliar ideas weren't quietly buried.

From the ranked topics we built three roadmaps: a portfolio of the nine top-scoring projects, a bolder long-term program that integrated related topics into larger efforts, and a budget-constrained option sized to the committee's annual research funding. Advanced Work Packaging topped every ranking.

The work was published by CII as How to Double Productivity (FR-DCC-01) and presented at the 2019 CII Annual Conference.