Prioritizing Preproject Planning Activities Using Value of Information Analysis

Abstract

Preproject planning is becoming a widespread best management practice. Potentially, it can be an extremely time and resource intensive practice and, as such, presents challenges in the management, allocation, and prioritization of the resources applied to it. This research presents a novel solution to this challenge. The solution prioritizes preproject planning activities using the value-of-information analysis and simple optimization methods applied to a modified project definition rating index (PDRI). First, scope definition elements are identified from a PDRI, and expected cost-to-benefit ratios for each element are quantified. Then, an optimized resource allocation is performed to prioritize the elements in the scope definition improvement process. We demonstrate this framework in a case study for adaptive building reuse because these are complex projects whose overall success can be directly linked to effective preproject planning using constrained resources. Results of this case study find that optimizing preproject planning using the proposed methodology resulted in approximately $127,000 of cost-savings, representing 5% of the total project cost.