Experimental Study on Virtual Value Management Workshop in Hong Kong

Abstract

Stakeholders engaged in value management (VM) practices often encounter the problem that the participants are too dispersed geographically from the workshop venue. Therefore, the introduction of a virtual collaboration method to VM studies is an effective and economical way to solve the problem, especially in the construction industry, where stakeholders may not be in the same country. However, there is currently a lack of knowledge on the implementation of virtual VM studies. This paper proposes a framework of virtual VM workshop to enable participants’ remote participation and virtual collaboration. Key issues in addressing virtual settings and virtual teams are considered and involved in the development of the proposed framework. To implement virtual VM workshops, a virtual value management system (VVMS) was developed first on available Internet technologies and in line with the proposed framework. An experimental workshop was then conducted to test the effect of the virtual VM workshop by investigating data from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives generated from the VVMS, and from a questionnaire survey. The workshop outcomes, questionnaire results, and feedback of participants show that the VM study can be delivered virtually to a satisfactory level, using the support of VVMS.