Comparative study of traditional and group decision support-supported value management workshops

Value management (VM) participants often encounter problems of lack of active participation in addition to insufficient time and information in decision analysis. Group decision support systems (GDSS) have been proposed to overcome these problems by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of VM studies. To investigate the effect of using GDSS in VM workshops, three experimental studies together with questionnaire surveys have been conducted to compare the traditional VM and GDSS-supported workshops. The results have revealed that GDSS can help improve the performance of VM workshops in quantity of ideas, process efficiency, and participants' satisfaction. These outcomes are valuable to the construction industry in Hong Kong, in which both the government and industry have called for wider use of VM, and yet users often encounter difficulties that are attributable to the large number of participants and short duration of the workshops.