Setting the Foundation for the CII Resource Concierge

The current CII Knowledge Base (KB) has over 270 topics, with multiple publications, presentations, and tools available under each topic. Users from various design, construction, and project management backgrounds interact with the KB and often find it challenging and time-consuming to locate resources relevant to their projects.

CII charged RT-392 with developing the foundation for a concierge to interact with a wide range of users having diverse backgrounds, specialties, and levels of experience. The team’s essential research question was: “Can a resource concierge be developed to provide users with relevant CII resources stored in its KB, which are responsive and relevant to a unique query?”

RT-392 aimed to develop a significantly improved search methodology for the user to apply against the KB, thereby increasing the effectiveness of the search process. This improvement, in turn, would show member companies a well-defined value proposition associated with their membership, and would also give member users access to the numerous best practices and research tools to enhance their project management practices policies and procedures.

This project had several specific objectives:

1. Articulate the concierge’s requirements by defining functionality, outputs, and graphical user interface.
2. Develop a proof-of-concept concierge search engine with advanced filtering functionalities.
3. Prototype the concierge’s graphical user interface.
4. Create a framework that enables the bundling of related tools by leveraging clustering algorithms.
    

The most salient elements of the proof-of-concept concierge search engine were:

• Search capabilities – allow a user to search by keywords, complete keyword phrase or question, resource ID (e.g., IR113-2), and special characters (such as a question mark).
   
• Search results – filter the results by the following variables and sort them by relevance and date:
  1. Project phases
  2. Project functions
  3. Industry sectors
  4. Geographical regions
  5. Knowledge areas
  6. Best practices
  7. Product types
  8. Dates of publication
      
• Resource identification – display the following data for each result:
  1. Resource title
  2. Links to research summary and research document
  3. Resource ID (e.g., IR113-2)
  4. Product type (e.g., implementation resource)
  5. Knowledge area (e.g., Project Planning)
  6. Research topic
  7. Authoring research team’s ID (e.g., RT-113)
  8. Other documents published by the same research team
  9. Publication overview or summary
  10. Date of publication
  11. Other related tools
       
• User interface – give users the option to display search results in either a list form or a card form (a.k.a. bento box).