Manhours and interruptions in traditional house building

Abstract Productivity, a measure of the effective use of resources, can provide vital benefits to society. Two Scottish traditional house Building sites, surveyed by the Building Research Establishment (BRE) activity sampling method, provided the data discussed in the paper. Two main findings showed considerable variation in manhours for repeated operations and that the number of visits by operatives to complete operations were large. However, the activity sampling data could not explain the causes of variation in manhours or the numbers of visits. Future work must be more detailed, though immediately more limited in scope due to data volume, to explain these causes.