ENHANCING COST ADVICE OF PUBLIC SECTOR CLIENT ORGANISATIONS BY FORMALISING BUILDING PRICE FORECASTING PROCESS

Public sector procurement laws require that building price forecast be established in-house atconstruction project initiation. This has often posed problems of performance most times due topoor budgeting (causing building projects cost and time overruns) for proposed projectsespecially public funded projects. Thus, Building Price Forecasting (BPF),which is the basicfor cost advicethat public client organisations use as budget for assessing building projectsfunds from government is of significant importance within the context of organisationalmanagement and performance. Organisation management theory state that the outcome oforganisations is influenced by behaviours inherent in organisations. Hence, attempts atimproving building price forecasting in public client organisations would require anunderstanding of the effect of the behaviours therein. Exploring Organisational Behaviour(OB) model, this paper presents and discusses theoretical conceptions for understanding BPFprocess within public sector client organisations with a view to improving and formalising theprocess. The model conceptualises building price forecasting at the three levels of anorganisation i.e. individual, group and organisation within the 'input-process-output'framework. For the required data,expert survey and focus group discussion were conductedbased on the outcome of a literature review which gave insights to the likely steps required for aformalised BPF process.40questionnairewere distributed to professionals in 40 firms both inKaduna and Abuja, descriptive and inferential analysis was used to analyse their responses.Toappraise potential influences of organisational behaviours on BPFprocess,70questionnairewere distributed to participants of BPF production units in six UniversitiesandPartial least square – structural equation modelling(PLS – SEM) was used to analyse therelationships and the influences. The study found that organisationalbehaviours interactionswith one another do influenced an individual task performance, which ultimately affects theoutcome. The study also found that there is no formalised and documentedBPF process,therefore, the study recommends that public client organisations shouldadopt the formalisedprocess established herein and ensure the policy of forming teams for the purpose of BPFformulation in order to enhance the performance of the BPF.