Development of Web-based Design Management System through User Participatory Design and Use-case Modeling

Construction industry consists of several phases in which a variety of stakeholders are involved. As construction projects are becoming larger, more complex and more diverse, the design phase has been more important factor for the success of projects than ever before. However, it is considered that most of design work occurred in actual design process is intangible. Such recognition makes the design phase more unsystematic and arbitrary, which finally weakens the competitiveness of whole project. In order to solve these problems, this study developed a web-based system for integrated design management (IDMS) which consists of 8 modules including design document, schedule, quality, and building permit management. This section is intended to validate the system implementation and its effectiveness. Two characteristics have made this research significantly different from previous studies. First of all, users of the system including architects and other design professionals were continuously involved starting from the development phase to the validation phase. The other unique characteristic is that the actual design project was applied as a test bed in the final verification stage. The research team applied the actual data which had been generated while each business process, and verified the effectiveness of system implementation. The authors expect that such a user-centered approach enable the system more robust and effective.