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Benchmarking in construction
Steven McCabe

£37.50
CBD stock no: 3012

Much of this volume is written in the first person and explains the development of the author's own knowledge. This is an effective way to discuss a subject that will be new to a sizeable proportion of the intended readership.

The book is well-structured, beginning with a personal introduction and "getting to grips with the concepts". Benchmarking itself appears only after a careful contextual review of total quality management and the importance of effecting changes to traditional organisational cultures. Benchmarking is then reviewed thoroughly, in a fairly traditional academic way. The author recounts its historical development, explains various approaches, introduces key authors and assesses benchmarking practices. There are chapters on critical success factors, customer satisfaction and ways of becoming "world class". Finally, there is a chapter on "moving from theory to practice", which contains a series of nine case studies from managers, again refreshingly written in the first person.

The book is a good learning text. Each chapter begins with a box that states objectives clearly and ends with a summary. The layout and text are visually straightforward and admirably clear. Discussion centres on principles intrinsic to the field's development and provides clear guidance on the framework and techniques of benchmarking. More broadly, the volume presents a perspective on the need to improve the performance of a fairly backward industry, with a focus on human resource management. The chapter on cultural change is very good.

This book goes beyond an introduction, but it stops well short of a practical manual. It does provide a "three-phase, fourteen-step approach to benchmarking", but this is fairly basic. The volume's main use to construction managers will be to provide a sound foundation for developing and managing benchmarking schemes. It should also provoke serious thought about what sort of managers they want to be.