Investigating Facilitators and Barriers for Adopting Lean Construction Principles in the Nigerian Building Consulting Firms

The adoption of lean construction principles within the manufacturing and other industries has led to notable improvement and has resulted in improved time-to-market, reduced production cost, improved quality of the product and active customer involvement. The intent of this study was to investigate and identify facilitators and barriers that construction-related Nigerian consulting firms could use to adopt lean construction principles. The method of study consisted of a critical exposition of related literature and an empirical study employing the mean scores with relative ranking. The results of the study revealed that availability of trained professionals, education, and skills development are the most important facilitators for adopting lean construction principles. In contrast, barriers to adoption of lean construction principles that were ranked most important include: inadequate preplanning, corruption, inadequate exposure to the requirements for lean implementation, inaccurate and incomplete designs, and misconception about lean concepts. These barriers existed in areas such as: management, financial, educational, governmental, technical areas. These barriers also existed within human attitudes and interpersonal interactions. The study recommends that building construction stakeholders in the Nigerian construction industry should provide a more enabling environment that will guide and ease the adoption of lean construction principles.