Critical success factors for maintenance of local public buildings

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate a survey on critical success factor for the maintenance of local public buildings and how reported score values and factor rankings depend on characteristics (contingencies) of the local governments that participated. Design/methodology/approach The authors use data from a large-scale survey of Norwegian local governments that covered 66 per cent of all local governments and 80 per cent of the population. The authors combine these data with contingent information from public registers on demographics, fiscal, political and geographical characteristics. The authors run regressions to determine whether contingencies affect survey results. They further study how score values vary with a key contingent factor. Findings The main result of this paper is that the reported importance of critical success factors is contingent on local government population levels. A comparison of importance rankings based on population quartiles shows that ranking orders change, both between quartiles and from the overall ranking, and that certain factors show systematic changes. Further, the authors find that when controlling for sampling error, groups of factors should be considered as equally important. This result holds both for the full sample ranking and for rankings within population quartiles. Originality/value The results of this paper have implications for all survey-based investigations of critical success factors where contingent information on respondents are available. Contingencies need to be taken into consideration, both when assessing rankings according to some criteria and when comparing actual score values.

Investments and maintenance spending for public facilities: what do we know and what do we want to know

“…Hopland and Kvamsdal (2016) and Hopland et al .’s (2019) study optimal maintenance levels over time for public buildings. These studies settle into a large literature using optimization techniques to analyze maintenance in a variety of settings.…”

“…It is worth noting that a large bulk of the papers in the “theory box,” in particular those in “Economics” mainly use a theoretical model to motivate an empirical analysis rather than having theory development as the main purpose. We must emphasize that the division of the literature into these boxes is by no means an attempt to «rate» the literature, only to show which are most similar to the studies by Hopland and Kvamsdal (2016) and Hopland et al . (2019).…”

“…In a follow-up study, Hopland et al . (2019) relax several of the assumptions in the original contribution.…”

“…The framework is life-cycle cost analysis, as discussed by, amongst others, Bogenstätter (2000), the UK Office of Government Commerce (OGC, 2003), and Heralova (2014). As a point of departure, we use two recent papers that attempt to establish a general theoretical framework for maintenance of public purpose buildings (Hopland and Kvamsdal, 2016; Hopland et al ., 2019).…”

“…The mathematical optimization models derived in Hopland and Kvamsdal (2016) and Hopland et al . (2019) are mainly technical expositions.…”