Online Monitoring and Implementation of Commitment Management Performance and Its Impact on Project Planning in Four Construction Projects

Abstract

The construction sector has not evolved with respect to the productivity of its processes and has not grown as expected in the last 50 years. Therefore, the Last Planner System (LPS) was created, which is based on commitment management to improve productivity. However, only one system has been proposed to manage commitments properly, the Commitment Management System (CMS). This research created an online intervention to measure the evolution and correlation of the commitment and maturity indicators of LPS and CMS, and the behavior of social network analysis (SNA) in four construction projects. The research was divided into four parts: (1) a literature review of commitment management in the field; (2) an online adaptation of the intervention; (3) an implementation and follow-up for 10 weeks in online format, observing the evolution of CMS, SNA, and LPS; and (4) an evaluation and analysis of how the online implementation impacts the indicators, establishing trend lines and relationships among the indicators. With this intervention, the indicators of commitment management, the level of implementation of the Last Planner System, the percentage of plan completed (PPC), and the interactions among the participants were analyzed, obtaining a sustained increase of as much as 7.02% in the first 5 weeks, with a slight decrease after the intervention in some cases, such as PPC (−0.01%). The intervention showed that the percentage of compliance negotiation and agreements is a fundamental indicator for establishing a better PPC, because the SNA metrics also were affected indirectly, based on Spearman’s correlation analysis between all the measured indicators. This research demonstrated that online intervention works as a novel tool, without the need for researchers to be in the field, obtaining promising results during project monitoring.