Thesis Submitted to the College of Architecture and Civil Engineering for the Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Civil Engineering (Construction Technology and Management

The Ethiopian construction industry has been always criticized for its underperformance due to various reasons. The performance of the construction industry is one of the major development constraints in our country since our development highly depends on the growth of physical infrastructures. Therefore, it is important to identify the factors that are contributing to the underperformance to minimize their effect and consequently improve the industry. Performance measurement is identified as the first stage in any improvement process. It is important for organizations to evaluate their actual objectives against the predefined goals to make certain that they are doing well towards achieving the project goals. Therefore, there is a necessity to develop building project performance evaluation method, which can be easily applied on projects to assess their status at different stages of project lifecycle. In this thesis, it’s attempted to develop multidimensional performance evaluation method which incorporates both leading and lagging KPIs and apply the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to formulate a benchmarking method to assess project performance at any phase of the construction stage. Five key performance indicators are identified from literatures and experience of other countries, pairwise comparison of each performance indicator is performed using AHP tool. The result of the analysis shows that quality is major performance indicator with 34%, while time, cost, safety and client’s satisfaction have 24%, 13%, 16% and 13% respectively.