Measuring Quality of Writing of Construction Specifications

Abstract

The quality of writing of construction specifications is one of the greatest challenges facing construction contractors or their representatives in today’s business environment. Writers of construction specifications have been criticized for their contribution toward construction disputes. Although the construction business environment has moved toward modernization of some of its business processes, claims arising from construction specifications continue to rise. Equally, a written exposition of a quantitative instrument that measures the quality of writing of construction specifications is not available in the literature. Thus the construction industry needs to develop methodologies for measuring the quality of writing of construction specifications that should overcome their current underperformance in this area. This paper presents the procedures that underlie the quality of writing of construction specifications, gives a management tool for facilitating its measurement, and also presents the results of construction contractors’ practices regarding the quality of said writing. The results show that the surveyed Malawian construction contractors were in the process of putting in place principles to govern the quality of writing of construction specifications.