Sustainable building processes' challenges and strategies : the relative important index approach

Sustainability has been increasingly advocated by the global construction industry due to the need to minimise the industry's adverse impacts. An important area when focusing on sustainability is the issue of project management teams since they are involved from the project's inception to its completion. Many studies have investigated and advocated a wide range of sustainability practices within the construction industry. However, little attention has been geared towards construction project management teams when addressing the issues of sustainability. This study aims to provide an empirical analysis of the challenges and mitigating strategies for enhancing project management teams’ readiness in the adoption of sustainable building processes. It does so by undertaking an extensive critical review of literature resulting in the identification of sixteen challenges and sixteen mitigation strategies and conducted a cross-sectional survey among 200 Ghanaian construction industry professionals. Data obtained from the survey was analysed using descriptive statistics and relative importance index rankings. The study revealed that inadequate training and education, unfamiliarity with green technologies, and higher initial costs of green construction practices and materials are the key challenges that hinder project management teams’ implementation of sustainable building processes. The study further revealed the significant mitigation strategies such as educating stakeholders on the future benefits of green buildings, engaging personnel with green building background, and setting sustainable priorities and goals early in the feasibility study. The value of this paper is to help project management teams to understand these challenges and strategize to turn them into opportunities for the construction industry.