CII FSC Guidelines for Research Teams

1. Introduction

CII, based at The University of Texas at Austin, is a consortium of leading owner, engineering-contractor, and supplier firms from both the public and private arenas. CII’s mission is to provide a research and development platform to create and drive innovative solutions that tangibly improve business outcomes through an academically-based, disciplined approach.

This document provides guidelines for research projects sponsored by CII. CII research projects are intended to create new knowledge, whether as a model, framework, hypothesis validation, technology, case study, or new practice definition. While these projects may vary in their duration and organization, all will follow the baseline process that is outlined in this document, which can be adapted as required.

CII Research: Starting with the End in Mind

The goal of CII research projects is to improve the way organizations plan and execute capital projects. It is important for research team members to start CII research projects with this end in mind and to deliver research outcomes that have the potential to improve project delivery.

Figure 1 shows the process for applied research and development. Improvements may come in small increments or step changes. In more tactical research projects, this means outcomes that create or change procedures, including practices and tools that can be implemented by practitioners. In other cases, outcomes may provide high-level insights into changes and opportunities to be adopted by the industry.

Open

Figure 1. Applied Research and Development

Project outcomes are considered models, practices, and/or frameworks that, once applied, can improve the delivery of capital projects. In many cases, these outcomes are prototyped in a tool that will be readily available at the end of the research project (e.g., the PDRI tool). Other times, the outcome could be a framework that may require further development for implementation; for instance, the Advanced Work Packaging process defined by CII Research Team 272 (RT-272).

The guidelines presented here create the means for CII to work with research teams to assure that the final outcomes and deliverables fulfill the original goal.

Roles and Responsibilities

Throughout the research project duration, academic and industry members of the team collaborate following the roles and responsibilities listed in the figures below. While each team develops its own culture and establishes its own norms for operation, CII expects every team to be led by two industry experts selected by CII to serve as “chair” and “vice-chair.” The principal investigator (s) (PI(s)), serving as the process expert(s), will work with the team to develop a detailed research plan, while the chairs will facilitate and lead the overall research effort. In their roles, the chairs will facilitate and promote engagement, serve as spokespersons for the team, and ensure that the results of the research will benefit CII’s members.

Academics drive rigor and innovation in the research process. This rigor should be guided by a research methodology that must be effectively communicated to CII throughout the early stages of the research process. These communications typically happen during progress updates, but ad-hoc meetings can be scheduled as needed. Academics need to find ways to engage and collaborate with the industry members of the research team by understanding their expectations and driving team building and alignment across the group.

The figure below describes the roles and responsibilities for the industry members of CII research teams.

Open

Figure 2. Industry Members – Roles and Responsibilities

CII Research Process

Figure 3 shows the life cycle of a research project, which is detailed in the remainder of this document.

Open

Figure 3. The Phases of a Standard Two-year CII Research Project

Research Team Performance Assessment

CII conducts ongoing performance assessments to ensure project success. Key indicators include staffing levels and attendance, post-project team member satisfaction surveys, and detailed progress updates that monitor scope, methodology, data collection, and deployment potential.

2. Before the Kickoff Meeting: From Topic Development to Kickoff Day

Topic Definition

CII research topics are developed in a collaborative ideation process. Ideas for research topics are proposed by CII committees, Communities for Business Advancement, and individuals. CII prioritizes and further develops these ideas in collaboration with industry members, a process that culminates in a topic summary.

The topic summary is a short document that outlines the research topic, indicating the problem or opportunity being addressed, the research question(s), and expected outcomes. CII then uses this document as it requests qualification submittals from the academic community as well as participation nominations from industry members.

Team Staffing

Academic Members

Academic members are selected via Request of Qualifications (RFQ), Request for Proposals (RFP), or sole sourcing. CII engages panels of industry members and academics during its selection of RFQs and RFPs. CII has encouraged (and sometimes required) the engagement of experts from other domains with the goal of bringing in innovations from outside the capital projects industry. The outside expert is not necessarily the co-PI. The outside expert can be seen as a consultant to the team with specific goals.

Industry Members

CII coordinates the recruitment for research project staffing and aims to balance the participation of owner and contractor organizations and industry groups in its projects. The goal is to organize research teams that are diverse and represent different perspectives. Most research teams consist of 15 to 20 members, but team size can vary widely depending upon the topic and the business environment.

Members are commonly recruited via Request for Nominations, normally conducted between February and May of each year.

After the kickoff meeting, any potential new members who are identified directly by current team members need to be submitted to CII for approval. CII requires CII Board of Advisors members to vet any nominations of their organizations’ employees.

Note that, while non-member organizations may provide data and expertise, non-members cannot be part of the research team. This means that non-members cannot systematically attend team meetings.

Proposal Development

After academics have been selected via RFQ or sole sourcing, they will develop a proposal prior to team kickoff. This proposal will be the basis for the research contract and will also serve as an initial charter for use during the research team's kickoff.

CII’s Research Coordinator will coordinate meetings with the selected academics and, where possible, include industry members in the development of the proposal.

Kickoff

A “standard” kickoff traditionally consisted of a full-day meeting with the entire team in attendance and hosted by CII in its offices in Austin (or at a CII event like the CII Annual Research Conference) and managed by CII.

CII leads the kickoff coordination in collaboration with the principal investigators, the RT Chair and Vice-chair (if identified ahead of the kickoff). Table 1 shows a checklist to be addressed in preparation for the kickoff.

Table 1. The Activities and Responsible Parties Associated with Kicking off a CII Research Team

The research team should use its kickoff meeting to align on project objectives, scope, expected methodology, and deliverables. CII will share templates for the CII kickoff meetings.

During the kickoff meeting, the team schedules its face-to-face (F2F) meetings and recurring calls. It is important to block as many F2F meetings as early as possible, so team members can seek approvals and make travel plans.

3. Research Execution

This section addresses the overall execution of the project by the research team, including guidelines for team meetings, research methodology including validation, and data collection and management practices.

Research Team Meetings

As a rule, or unless directed differently, all CII Research Teams must:

• Use meetings as the primary engagement mechanism between industry members and academics across all project phases. Academics must coordinate planning and execution with the RT Chair and Vice-chair.

• Establish and maintain the meeting cadence

  • Hold 2–3 hybrid meetings per year (beyond the kickoff meeting); in-person participation is strongly recommended (full day to 1.5 days)

  • Schedule and conduct biweekly online meetings (~2 hours), adjusting frequency during low-availability periods (e.g., summer)

• Design meetings as working sessions

  • Do not use meetings for status updates

  • Assign specific tasks to members and use subgroups/breakouts

  • Use collaborative tools (e.g., Mural) to support engagement

  • Adapt format (virtual, hybrid, F2F) based on meeting objectives

• Use F2F meetings to advance critical work

  • Align on scope and direction early

  • Build team engagement

  • Develop, outline, and refine deliverables

• Plan and communicate expectations

  • Define and share a project roadmap early; revisit regularly

  • Ensure each meeting clearly supports the project plan

  • Define and outline deliverables no later than the project midpoint

• Enforce participation and accountability

  • Require active participation; attendance is monitored

  • Address low participation (i.e., <60% attendance or extended absences) or 4 and four consecutive missed meetings

  • Invite the CII Research staff to all meetings

• Apply standard meeting practices

  • Include a safety moment and review guidelines at every meeting

  • Provide structured opportunities for member contributions

Progress Updates

CII schedules progress updates as well as ad-hoc calls with research teams to monitor project progress.

Team leadership (i.e., Chair, Vice-chair, and PIs) is expected to attend these calls along with CII staff and any sponsoring committee representatives.

The team should prepare slides using the template provided by CII to support the scheduled progress updates and submit these slides to the Program Coordinator one week ahead of the call.

The focus of progress updates for a CII research project evolves over time, following a general sequence aligned with project maturity. Each update typically builds on the prior one, with emphasis shifting to the next stage rather than revisiting earlier topics unless there are significant changes. The progression is as follows:

• Initial updates focus on alignment and scope refinement

• Subsequent updates focus on methodology, including refinement of the methodology summary table

• Updates then shift to data collection and analysis

• Followed by preliminary results and expected outcomes

• Later updates emphasize refined results and validated outcomes

• Final updates focus on the report outline, synthesis of results, and outcomes

• As the project nears completion, rehearsals replace regular updates

• The process concludes with final presentations and report review

Table 2 and Table 3 describe items to consider during progress updates.

Table 2. Progress Updates – Key Points for Research Methodology and Outcomes

Table 3. Progress Update Checklist – Project Logistics

Following the update, CII staff may update the RT wiki page, reflecting CII’s understanding of the RT progress including methodology.

Collaborative Workspaces and Tools

CII encourages every research team to adopt a virtual space for communications and for file sharing. CII recommends Trello and Microsoft Teams as two good alternatives:

• Trello supports collaborative planning and file sharing. A good alternative for Trello is Microsoft Planner, part of the Office 365 suite of applications.

• Microsoft Teams offers a more integrated environment that supports messaging, file sharing via SharePoint, whiteboarding using Microsoft Whiteboard, asynchronous communications (messaging), and online meetings in an integrated environment. CII will not set up Team spaces as it cannot assign administrators outside the UT Austin environment. Team leaders or PIs should create the team space for the RT.

• Mural can also be a good platform for establishing a dashboard for the project – but since anyone with the link can access the page, no sensitive information should be posted in Mural. Mural’s advantage is the like low level of access restrictions.

For online and hybrid meetings, CII encourages research teams to use collaborative tools, such as Mural (https://www.mural.co/). Note that CII will support workshops in Mural for kickoffs if requested by research teams, but team members and academics should use their own accounts afterwards.

Guidelines for Research Methodology

CII research has always been valued by CII members because of its academic rigor. We strive to live up to this expectation and expect academics to drive rigor through their research methodology.

• The research methodology should be communicated early and updated throughout the entire process, allowing any questions or concerns to be addressed as early as possible.

• The methodology is periodically reviewed by academic peers and CII may provide feedback to the team if any concerns are identified.

• The point of departure for the research methodology is the initial proposal – either submitted to the Request for Proposals or developed after a Request for Qualifications.

• This initial methodology framework is expected to be discussed soon after the kickoff, refined during the initial months of the research, and revisited in every progress update.

• The methodology discussion during progress updates should include both a high-level presentation of the methodology and detailed supporting slides.

  • These detailed slides may contain information about survey instruments, tests, models, etc.

Guidelines for Research Validation

Research Teams are expected to validate the research and should not confuse the functional validation of a tool (whether a tool works as intended), and the validation of the results (based on statistical tests, or some qualitative analyses).

• We call the validation of the tool functionality a ‘functional validation’.

• To validate the proposed tool or practice, the RT needs to obtain data on the tool usage and results/impacts of its use.

• Opinion surveys about the impact of the tool/proposed practice are not considered a rigorous validation of the tool/practice. CII does not accept opinion surveys as a means to claim validity of results.

Guidelines for Data Collection and Management

Research teams are expected to use diverse sources of data – both external and internal to CII, including primary and secondary data. When appropriate, structured interviews, case studies, field trials, simulation modeling, project (“hard”) data surveys, and other data-gathering and data-generating techniques should be considered, provided such techniques and methods produce data, and that the resulting analysis and conclusions are consistent with “rigorous, accepted academic standards following a structured scientific process.”

Data collection sources, data types, and other information related to data collection must be summarized in the “Data Summary” table, included in the progress update template.

If a team plans to use opinion surveys, it should carefully plan and evaluate the purpose of these surveys. Many survey instruments (and the questions they pose), although they seek factual data, capture only the opinions of respondents. CII, therefore, provides the following guidelines for the use of surveys in CII research:

• Surveys may be primarily used to solicit ideas, suggestions, target resources, etc., and may also be used to obtain hard project data.

• Researchers should also recognize that directing surveys only to the CII membership may not result in the desired innovation and broadening of CII member perspectives. There is a risk that surveying only CII members could simply reinforce existing practices, processes, and perspectives; inadvertently skew research results; and deny CII members the benefits of broader opportunities, innovations, and viewpoints. This consideration is particularly relevant for technology-related projects.

• CII research team surveys should not be used to generate opinion-based research conclusions. Care should be taken in crafting survey questions to avoid unintended confusion between “opinions” and “hard data.” For example, if a well-intentioned question (e.g., “What improvement in X would result if Y were implemented?”) is ultimately an “opinion” question, then so too would be the response. Typically, survey results that reflect the opinions of the respondents might be used in guiding the progress and direction of the research effort but would not be used to validate findings of the research and, in particular, benefits to be derived from the research.

Furthermore, any such survey should carefully identify (and the RT should report it in the progress updates) the objective of the survey, which may include:

• To gather general information, potential research resources, or ideas for innovations or solutions;

• To gather hard data, typically associated with the Testing/Validation phase of the research.

CII expects any data generated by its RT to be submitted to CII at project close-out, including the following examples:

• An updated version of the data summary table (as provided during progress updates).

• Data in Excel or another database format.

• Copies of surveys used to collect data.

Projects collecting quantitative project data (i.e., regarding project cost, schedule, etc.) should align with the data fields used in CII’s Data Warehouse. This practice will allow data collected by research teams to be integrated into the Warehouse. Data fields can be found in the Benchmarking Associates training materials: integration toolkit, training slides, and session recording.

Guidelines for Research Data and Result reporting Confidentiality

• All data collected by CII research projects in support of research activities are to be considered “company confidential.”

• Only PIs and their designated academic research assistants will be allowed permitted access to the raw data collected for CII research projects.

• The data are provided by organizations with the assurance that individual company data will not be communicated in any form to any party other than CII-authorized academic researchers and designated CII staff members.

• While serving on CII research teams, industry participants may at times be exposed to summaries of proprietary, company confidential data as necessary to support the research (for instance, when discussing case studies).

• Any data or analyses based on these data that are shared with others or published will represent summaries of data from multiple organizations participating in the data gathering and collection effort, aggregated in a way that will preclude identification of proprietary data origins and/or the specific performance of individual organizations.

• Reports, presentations, and proceedings containing statistical summaries of aggregated company data may be used to support research findings.

  • To protect the confidentiality of companies submitting data, all charts and figures published and/or presented must reflect the aggregate of no less than 10 projects and must have been submitted by at least three separate companies.

  • In cases where a disproportionate amount of the data is provided by a single company, the PI will suppress publication of results until the dataset is sufficient to mitigate confidentiality and bias concerns.

  • Where smaller samples are used to support case study and field trial research, either a release will be obtained from the companies submitting such data or all confidential identifiers will be removed before using the data unless companies provide written permission for the identification of case studies.

• Reports, case studies, and data files containing individual organization or project data are considered confidential and will not be published or released without specific permission in writing from each company’s representative to the CII Board of Advisors.

  • It is the responsibility of the PI(s) to obtain this permission.

Data Reuse and Derivative Work

• CII considers the datasets to be part of the project deliverables.

• Datasets cannot be published or shared with the public in any form.

• At the completion of the research project, the PI may keep a copy of the dataset with the confidential company, project, and respondent identifiers removed to support future academic research and publication needs.

• CII asks academics to submit derivative works for comments prior to their submission to publication in conferences or journals.

  • CII’s goal is to ensure that data are reported according to our guidelines – ensuring the confidentiality of our member companies.

Considerations on IP

• According to the CII membership agreement, member organizations may assign employees to CII research teams and other initiatives in order to provide industry perspective.

  • Such participation does not grant member ownership rights in any patents, copyrights or other intellectual property developed by CII.

• Products (including publications and any associated tools or technology) that are approved and released by CII to its members can be used internally by the member in the conduct of its own business without further notice to CII.

  • However, “use” specifically excludes rights for members to commercially sell, or otherwise publish the product, or any derivative or modification thereof, or other background intellectual property owned by CII.

• No data from any proprietary database source will be delivered to member or any other third party under this Agreement.

Guidelines for the Use of AI

• AI will certainly affect what CII researches and how research is conducted.

• As a rule CII should not fund a topic that can be addressed by an AI tool: AI is changing the expectation for projects - if a question can be reasonably answered by AI then there is no value

• CII considers the following reasonable uses of AI

  • Literature review

  • Brainstorming support (seed ideas)

  • Report writing – given a good outline and draft

  • Creating images and illustrations

• Other uses may require alignment with CII as they may introduce unwanted risks in the research process:

  • Identify critical factors and recommendations for the process

  • Write entire sessions from scratch

CII requires RTs to disclose use of AI in progress updates following the template.

4. Dissemination and Knowledge Management

The dissemination phase includes rehearsals for final presentation development, report writing, and any other document or resource that communicates the research outcomes.

CII provides detailed guidance on the structure, content and format of different publications and outcomes in the CII Publication Guide. You can find the file in the CII Research Wiki. The document includes guidance for the Final Report (required for all projects), Implementation Resources (optional), prototypical tools (optional), and other required deliverables including the Excel files for tagging the new knowledge in the CII library.

Publications are offered for members in the CII online library, and the content is leveraged in different ways by the CII Deployment area, including online courses, CII Best Practices Course, and CII Bootcamp.

Presenting Results

The standard presentation vehicle for a two-year project is a live presentation at a CII event. These are 30- to 40-minute presentations that require considerable effort (rehearsals) to produce an enticing presentation.

CII encourages all RT (and some may be required to) present an in-depth webinar focusing on the implementation of the research outcomes.

Alternatively, teams may present their results in an online webinar. This is particularly applicable to teams with shorter duration (one-year projects). CII will coordinate with the team to record the presentation in advance and schedule a live event that includes Q&A.

Regardless of the type of presentation, CII recommends that presentations should be led by industry members with the limited participation of academics. This helps industry members to connect with their peers, offers them a professional development opportunity, and helps members to mature the narrative in a way that they can also apply during report writing, discussed in the following section.

For major events like the CII Annual Research Conference, we provide detailed process descriptions of the teams. You can find examples from past years in the CII Research Wiki.

Knowledge Management

To effectively manage the knowledge generated by Research Teams (RTs) within the Construction Industry Institute (CII) body of knowledge, the following recommendations should be addressed:

• Glossary Management: Actively update and refine the CII glossary. RTs should propose new definitions or modifications to existing ones to accurately reflect emerging knowledge and terminology.

• Resource Archiving: Recommend archiving of CII resources that have been fully replaced. This ensures that outdated information is properly managed and does not cause confusion.

• Recommendations for the review and update of the CII Best Practices, specifically as they are described in IR-166-3, and on the CII website to incorporate new insights from RTs and maintain relevance.

5. Close-out

Each team will submit the close-out report no later than the end date of the research team’s contract. The close-out report ensures that all deliverables have been submitted and an official final expenditure report is provided to CII. The CII research coordinator will send reminders and follow up with teams in preparation for the project close-out.