A group support system to improve value management workshops in Hong Kong

A Group Support System (GSS) is a set of techniques, software and technology designed to focus and enhance the communication, deliberations and decision making of groups. The thousands of GSS experimental studies and field studies that have been conducted in the past two decades demonstrate that GSS is successful in improving the efficiency, reliability and quality of the group decision-making process in meetings. This paper aims to explore the application of GSS to support Value Management (VM) so as to improve the implementation of VM in Hong Kong’s construction industry. It begins with an introduction to VM and discusses the problems of implementing VM, including a lack of information, lack of participation and interaction and the difficulties of conducting evaluation and analysis in construction. Further, the paper introduces a conceptual 4-S GSS framework to illustrate how the discussion, information, collaboration, and decision analysis support of this framework can be applied to overcome the problems in VM studies, and what their benefits are.