Construction project control in the UK: Current practice, existing problems and recommendations for future improvement

•Problems pertinent to the contemporary project control practice in the UK identified.•Quite often cost and time are not integrated during the project control process.•Key stages of the project control process in practice are sometimes ad hoc.•65 improvement recommendations developed through interaction with practitioners.•83% of the recommendations were Delphi rated by experts as critical or important.

The aim of this study is to address the main deficiencies with the prevailing project cost and time control practices for construction projects in the UK. A questionnaire survey was carried out with 250 top companies followed by in-depth interviews with 15 experienced practitioners from these companies in order to gain further insights of the identified problems, and their experience of good practice on how these problems can be tackled. On the basis of these interviews and syntheses with literature, a list of 65 good practice recommendations have been developed for the key project control tasks: planning, monitoring, reporting and analysing. The Delphi method was then used, with the participation of a panel of 8 practitioner experts, to evaluate these improvement recommendations and to establish their degree of relevance. After two rounds of Delphi, these recommendations are put forward as “critical”, “important”, or “helpful” measures for improving project control practice.