Professional judgement and the mapping of the building project price forecasting process

This study contributes to what is known about the building project budget price forecasting process. The research has developed a greater understanding of the effect that judgement has on that process. As a result of this study the process map related to building project price advice has been extended and deepened. The work adopted a two-phased combined research approach. The first phase required a mailed survey to be carried out with a convenience sample of quantity surveying organisations located across England. The second phase required a total of fifteen in-depth interviews to be executed, with informed practitioners, in two separate rounds of data collection. The study provided evidence that building project price forecasters were prone to making systematic errors of judgement when considering subject related word problems. The study then identified a number of ‘cues’ used by practitioners to form their intuitive judgements and confirmed the nature and significance of the heuristics found to distort the quasi-rational judgements of professionals in practice. The report concludes by identifying issues that need to be addressed in future studies to further develop this process map of professional practice. The capture of best practices on the ground in this sphere of professional practice would contribute towards the development of an inter-active simulator that would facilitate the development of expertise in novice practitioners