Asitha Rathnayake, a PhD candidate at the Laing O’Rourke Centre supervised by Prof Campbell Middleton, presented his research work at the Construction Institute and Construction Research Congress Joint Conference 2024 held in Des Moines, Iowa.
Asitha’s PhD focuses on measuring and improving construction productivity. The lack of growth in productivity (i.e. output per input) is one of the major issues facing many countries' construction industries. One primary obstacle to understanding why this is the difference between how productivity is measured at the industry and project levels.
The paper presented by Asitha, titled “Measurement of Construction Productivity: State of the Practice in the UK,” co-authored with Dr Danny Murguia and Prof Campbell Middleton, is a first step in addressing this issue. It presents the results of a large industry survey that uncovered several interesting insights into how productivity is measured in construction projects and what limitations exist in the current measurement frameworks.