Assessment of the Utilisation of Post Occupancy Evaluation among Construction Professionals in Abuja-Nigeria.

Abstract

Completed projects and occupied buildings are dominated by an attitude of „never look back‟ syndrome. Once a building has been completed and handed over, the contractor moves on to the next project and rarely returns to check the performance of the building constructed largely due to non-inclusion of funding for Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE) in the design budgets and it is unclear who has the responsibility to conduct post occupancy evaluation operation. Therefore, the paper assessed the utilisation of POE among construction professionals in Abuja-Nigeria through the self-administration of structured questionnaires. Findings revealed that one of the drivers of POE practice is the application of design skill with greater effectiveness and the factors that affect the implementation of POE practice among construction professionals are structural factors prevalent in the construction industry and cost. There is an understanding among constructional professionals about the various POE methods but the cost of the person responsible for the commissioning and paying for the evaluation is an obstacle. Based on these, it is recommended that since one of the drivers of POE practice is to apply design skill with greater effectiveness, the orientation of all stakeholders should be changed from the immediate gains accruable from completed buildings to long term benefits that will be accruable when POE is incorporated in contractual agreements ab initio.