Knowledge discovery from post-project reviews

Patricia Carrillo, Jenny Harding and Alok Choudhary

Construction Management and Economics, 2011, vol. 29, issue 7, 713-723

Abstract: Many construction companies conduct reviews on project completion to enhance learning and to fulfil quality management procedures. Often these reports are filed away never to be seen again. This means that potentially important knowledge that may assist other project teams is not exploited. In order to ascertain whether useful knowledge can be gleaned from such reports, Knowledge Discovery from Text (KDT) and text mining (TM) are applied. Text mining avoids the need for a manual search through a vast number of reports, potentially of different formats and foci, to seek trends that may be useful for current and future projects. Pilot tests were used to analyse 48 post-project review reports. The reports were first reviewed manually to identify key themes. They were then analysed using text mining software to investigate whether text mining could identify trends and uncover useful knowledge from the reports. Pilot tests succeeded in finding common occurrences across different projects that were previously unknown. Text mining could provide a potential solution and would aid project teams to learn from previous projects. However, a lot of work is currently required before the text mining tests are conducted and the results need to be examined carefully by those with domain knowledge to validate the results obtained.

Date: 2011
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/01446193.2011.588953 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:conmgt:v:29:y:2011:i:7:p:713-723

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RCME20

DOI: 10.1080/01446193.2011.588953

Access Statistics for this article

Construction Management and Economics is currently edited by Will Hughes

More articles in Construction Management and Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().