Construction’s Value and Quality Management Split Mapped in 102-Study Review

Construction projects keep failing in familiar ways: budgets overrun, schedules slip, defects appear, and resources are wasted. A new systematic review argues that two of the field’s best-known remedies for these problems—value management and total quality management—have been studied and applied in strikingly unequal measure, and that this imbalance itself helps explain why they are rarely combined in practice. The review, published in Frontiers in Built Environment, synthesised 102 eligible articles published between 1994 and 2026 and used the patterns it found to propose a conceptual framework for integrating the two approaches across the project lifecycle.

The study, conducted by Ahmad M. Zamil, Mohammad Alhusban and Abdullah Alharkan, followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) approach. The authors searched Scopus, Web of Science and IEEE Xplore in March 2026, restricting the search to English-language publications. The initial searches returned 15,200 records: 7,250 from Scopus, 6,950 from Web of Science and 1,000 from IEEE Xplore. After removing 11,689 duplicates, the team screened 3,511 unique records by title and abstract, retaining 185 for full-text assessment. Eighty-three records were excluded at the eligibility stage, most often because they lacked a construction context, an explicit value- or quality-management method, or sufficient methodological detail, leaving 102 studies in the final evidence base.

Because the included studies varied widely in design, the authors applied a customised quality appraisal rather than a single design-specific checklist. Five criteria—conceptual relevance, clarity of aim, transparency of method, adequacy of evidence and contribution to the review question—were each scored on a three-point scale, producing total scores from 0 to 10. Two authors independently appraised a random sample of 26 studies, achieving a weighted Cohen’s kappa of 0.78, which indicates substantial agreement. Across all 102 studies, 41 (40.20 percent) were classified as high quality, 39 (38.24 percent) as moderate and 22 (21.57 percent) as low. The appraisal informed how much interpretive weight each study received in the narrative synthesis; no meta-analysis was performed, since pooling was judged inappropriate for such heterogeneous research.

The headline finding is a pronounced thematic asymmetry. Studies focused explicitly on quality management or total quality management accounted for 44.12 percent of the evidence base, while value management adoption and implementation made up 16.67 percent, value management status and barriers 3.92 percent, and value engineering just 1.96 percent. Geographically, the literature was nearly balanced, with 47.06 percent of studies set in developed countries, 46.08 percent in developing countries and 6.86 percent taking a global perspective. The authors caution that these frequencies describe the composition of the literature, not equivalent levels of real-world implementation, and that similar publication counts should not be read as evidence of equal implementation maturity.

To explain this asymmetry, the review draws on organisational ambidexterity theory. Following March’s classic distinction, total quality management is characterised as an exploitation capability: its mechanisms of process control, standardisation, defect prevention and incremental improvement work by reducing variance around an established definition of what a project should deliver. Value management, by contrast, is framed as an exploration capability: function analysis, option generation and stakeholder value clarification work by questioning that definition and searching for alternatives. Because exploitation is self-reinforcing and its benefits are more immediate and measurable, the theory predicts that it will institutionalise more readily—which is exactly what the review found. Value management, on this reading, appears in the literature predominantly through accounts of why it is not adopted.

The barriers the review identifies are indeed broader than technical shortcomings. The authors synthesised them into six categories: technical and methodological; organisational and governance; human capability and cultural; stakeholder and inter-organisational; institutional and policy; and resource and economic conditions. Recurring constraints include limited awareness, inadequate guidance, shortages of experienced facilitators, weak leadership commitment, fragmented decision-making, procurement arrangements that prioritise lowest initial price over whole-life value, and limited budgets, time and specialist personnel. Evidence from small construction projects shows value management is still frequently overlooked, constrained by knowledge, guidance, environmental, resource, methodological and cultural barriers. The review also stresses that these barriers cluster and reinforce one another, and that removing a single constraint—through training, for example—does not by itself generate sustained adoption, which still depends on leadership sponsorship, client demand and demonstrated benefits.

Digitalisation emerges as a significant enabling context rather than a solution in itself. The review identifies five mechanisms through which technologies such as building information modelling, digital twins, IoT-based monitoring, artificial intelligence and Industry 4.0 systems could connect value analysis with quality management: integrated data sharing, collaborative decision support, real-time monitoring and feedback, predictive analytics, and lifecycle learning and traceability. Recent work shows that BIM-based decision support can improve transparency, collaboration and design-stage validation, while AI-enabled value management systems may reduce dependence on individual expert judgement. But the authors are explicit that these gains are conditional: BIM adoption in developing-country settings remains constrained by organisational readiness, training, policy support and educational capability, and AI-supported value decisions depend on reliable data, suitable governance and usable workflows. Digital tools, the review concludes, amplify good governance and capability rather than substitute for them.

From these findings the authors derive their central proposal: the Integrated Value–Quality System, or IVQS. The framework positions value management as the strategic value-definition layer and total quality management as the operational quality-delivery layer, connected through three further elements—enabling conditions, integrative mechanisms, and feedback and learning loops. Integrative mechanisms include function analysis linked to process design, option evaluation linked to quality criteria, and performance measurement linked to value outcomes. Feedback loops treat implementation as iterative, with monitoring data, stakeholder feedback and lessons learned feeding back into both quality improvement and strategic value reassessment. The framework also specifies an eight-step implementation pathway running from business case and briefing, through procurement, design, tendering, construction and commissioning, to post-occupancy evaluation and organisational learning.

The authors are careful to frame the framework’s status honestly. IVQS is review-derived and conceptual; it has not been empirically validated in live projects, does not establish causal relationships between its components, and should be interpreted as a theoretically informed, testable architecture rather than a validated universal model. The review itself is limited by its reliance on selected databases, English-language publications and predefined inclusion criteria, which may have excluded grey literature and non-English work, and its narrative synthesis identifies patterns rather than pooled effect estimates. The proposed performance linkages—such as associations between quality planning and reduced rework, or between value definition and stakeholder satisfaction—remain subject to future empirical testing.

Those future tests are spelled out in detail. The authors propose a staged validation programme beginning with interviews, focus groups or a Delphi study involving value-management specialists, quality managers, clients, contractors and project managers; proceeding to comparative case studies across different project types and delivery systems; and culminating in pilot implementation or action research on live construction projects, followed by quantitative and longitudinal studies of the framework’s proposed relationships. Whether the construction industry can move beyond treating value and quality as parallel traditions, the review suggests, depends less on conceptual arguments for their compatibility—those already abound—than on designed mechanisms, governance arrangements and organisational capability that make integration routine rather than aspirational.

Subject of Research: A systematic literature review of value management and total quality management integration in construction projects

Article Title: Developing a framework for integrating value management and total quality management in construction projects: a systematic literature review with narrative synthesis

Article References: Zamil, A. M., Alhusban, M., & Alharkan, A. (2026). Developing a framework for integrating value management and total quality management in construction projects: a systematic literature review with narrative synthesis. Frontiers in Built Environment, 12, Article 1917756. https://doi.org/10.3389/fbuil.2026.1917756

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fbuil.2026.1917756

Keywords: value management, total quality management, construction projects, systematic review, PRISMA, organisational ambidexterity, implementation barriers, BIM, digital twins, Industry 4.0, project performance, conceptual framework