Construction teams today are accustomed to making increasingly sophisticated technical decisions. We evaluate equipment, materials, suppliers, technologies, and design alternatives through detailed comparisons involving cost analyses, constructability reviews, risk assessments, sustainability criteria, and performance metrics. Yet one of the most consequential project decisions is still routinely handled with surprising informality: selecting the people who will actually deliver the project.

In practice, many staffing decisions in construction still depend heavily on urgency, prior familiarity, informal recommendations, intuition, or immediate availability. Sometimes that works well — and sometimes it does not. Either way, it creates a contradiction that is difficult to ignore.

A project team might spend weeks rigorously evaluating a façade system or comparing heavy equipment alternatives, yet the process used to select a superintendent, a project engineer, or a key coordinator can sometimes amount to a handful of conversations and subjective impressions. This raises an uncomfortable question: if we apply structured decision-making frameworks to technical resources, why do we so rarely do the same when selecting project teams?

Where CBA Has Already Proven Its Value

Within Lean Construction, Choosing By Advantages (CBA) has become one of the most recognized frameworks for sound, defensible decision-making. It has been successfully applied to design alternatives, material selection, equipment comparison, technology adoption, supplier evaluation, and a range of other technical scenarios across the AEC industry.

What makes CBA genuinely valuable is not the scoring mechanism itself — it is the quality of conversation the process creates. Rather than debating abstract opinions, teams are guided to identify the concrete advantages that differences between alternatives generate in a specific context. That shift changes the nature of the discussion entirely. It becomes more transparent, more collaborative, and far more focused on real value than on personal preference.

"The real value of CBA often comes not from the score, but from the conversation it forces teams to have — one grounded in context, not preference."

An Unexplored Frontier: People Selection

Despite CBA's growing adoption in technical and operational decisions, one area remains relatively unexplored: applying the framework to people selection in construction projects. And to be fair, there are understandable reasons for that. Selecting people is fundamentally different from selecting equipment or materials.

People are not static systems with fixed technical properties. Human-centered decisions involve interpersonal dynamics, communication styles, leadership, adaptability, emotional intelligence, and contextual performance. The same professional may excel in one project environment and struggle significantly in another — and that complexity matters enormously.

A highly collaborative Lean project, for example, may demand entirely different interpersonal capabilities than a fast-track project operating under strict hierarchical structures. Two professionals with nearly identical technical qualifications may produce very different outcomes depending on how they interact with teams, manage pressure, communicate with stakeholders, or adapt to uncertainty.

This is where the discussion becomes interesting — because the goal is emphatically not to "score people" as though they were products. That would miss the point entirely. CBA does not eliminate human judgment; if anything, it demands more careful and explicit thinking about the assumptions driving a decision. In construction, where staffing choices are often made under pressure and with incomplete information, that rigor may be precisely what is missing.

Context Changes Everything

Consider a project team selecting a field engineer for a hospital project with phased construction and strict operational restrictions. A traditional evaluation might focus primarily on years of experience, technical knowledge, or software proficiency. But once the conversation becomes contextual, other advantages emerge. One candidate may have direct experience working inside active healthcare facilities. Another may demonstrate stronger communication during coordination meetings. A third may have participated in Lean implementation efforts or shown greater adaptability under changing site conditions.

These advantages are not always visible through conventional hiring discussions — yet they may significantly influence project performance. This is one of the most promising contributions CBA could bring to people-selection processes: it creates structured space for teams to openly examine which characteristics generate genuine value for a specific project environment, not in generic terms, but within context.

The Collaboration Imperative

That distinction is increasingly important as construction projects grow more dependent on collaboration. The adoption of Lean Construction, BIM-enabled coordination, Integrated Project Delivery (IPD), and Construction 4.0 practices is reshaping the type of professionals projects require. Technical competence remains essential — but it is no longer sufficient on its own. Today's projects also depend on people capable of:

And yet many staffing decisions still proceed through opaque, informal processes that are difficult to explain or justify after the fact.

What Early Research Suggests

Previous research presented at the International Group for Lean Construction (IGLC) explored early applications of CBA in people-selection scenarios within construction and engineering contexts. The findings were cautiously encouraging. Structured discussions appeared to improve transparency, align expectations among stakeholders, and surface hidden assumptions during selection processes.

At the same time, the research revealed genuine limitations. Human behavior is dynamic, performance evolves over time, interpersonal interactions resist prediction, and not every relevant characteristic translates neatly into predefined criteria.

That is precisely why this topic deserves more sustained discussion — not because CBA offers a perfect solution for selecting people (it does not), but because it may help organizations have better, more honest conversations about what they truly value in a project team. And that might matter more than it first appears.

An Invitation to Rethink the Process

Lean Construction has long emphasized collaboration, respect for people, transparency, and value generation. Yet many staffing decisions still rely heavily on subjective judgment concealed behind informal, unrepeatable processes. There is an opportunity here — not to replace intuition or standardize human potential, but to bring greater clarity, alignment, and intentionality to one of the most influential decisions any project organization makes.

Selecting the people who will shape project outcomes deserves the same rigor we routinely apply to selecting the systems they will work with. Perhaps Choosing By Advantages can help us begin that conversation.