Value Adding Resource Consumption as Perceived by a Client: A Case Study

Ineffective, unproductive and expensive are adjectives that increasingly have become associated with the Swedish construction industry. Measures taken to remedy the situation have been widespread and the industry has lacked a common understanding of the origin to the perceived deficiencies. Rarely have the contribution to the design of a building from consumed resources been assessed in retrospect. The scope of the conducted case study covered the brief and design phases of a Swedish construction project. The resources used were mapped through a documentary data collection and interviews with the client, a contractor and the city planning office. There were three categories (directly value adding, indirectly value adding and not value adding) to which time consumed by resources was allocated during interview. A summarised assessment over time of the consumed resources constituted a part of the result. The hypothesis that qualities that potentially could be considered valuable by the client were continuously added throughout the brief and design phases was tested and proven false. The study revealed that the client regarded only short periods of time as having been directly value adding. In turn separated by long periods of time where the client only saw small amounts of value adding time. In total the scope of the study covered 17,040 worked hours. 17 % of these were regarded as having been directly added value by the client. Out of which 78 % took place during 27 % of the time.