Factors governing construction project delivery selection: A content analysis
Introduction
Clients select PDSs to define the roles of project participants, share authority and responsibility, allocate profit and risk, and organize and incentive participants to fulfill the clients' project objectives (Ibbs and Chih, 2011, Luu et al., 2003b, Oyetunji and Anderson, 2006). In essence, PDSs (such as DBB, DB, EPC, PMC, CM) are selected to integrate resources from participating entities, including consultants, designers, contractors, and suppliers to make up for the clients' incapability in delivering construction projects. In this way, clients adapt PDSs to internal and external project conditions (Kandil et al., 2014, Kumaraswamy and Dissanayaka, 1998). As indicated in many studies on project performance, PDS determines how different parties participate in the project and whether they are assigned to tasks that put their advantages to best use (Chen et al., 2009, Ive and Chang, 2007). Hence, selecting an appropriate PDS is critical to project success, and PDS selection methodology has drawn attention from scholars around the world (Liu et al., 2015). Although numerous studies have focused on PDS selection, there are still issues remaining to be addressed.
On the one hand, in practice, inappropriate PDSs are selected based on limited project information, biased previous experience, and poorly identified, if any, list of factors to be considered (Luu et al., 2003a, Luu et al., 2003b, Rwelamila and Edries, 2007). Touran et al. (2010) conducted interviews with experienced transit project managers in the United States. He found that despite the existence of well-developed and advanced decision support models in the literature, few practitioners fully utilized them due to the difficulties encountered when understanding the methodologies and determining the model parameters. In practice, even merely an appropriately identified list of PDS selection factors, by itself, is very helpful to practitioners (Chan, 2007, Wang et al., 2013, Xiao-mei and Xiao-jun, 2011). Moreover, identifying governing factors is fundamental to any profound PDS selection methodology (Cheung et al., 2001, Luu et al., 2003a, Luu et al., 2003b). Therefore, comprehensively identifying factors governing PDS selection is crucial to both industrial practice and academic research, and has been a hot topic in the literature (Minchin et al., 2010). There have been numerous studies on PDS selection but no consensus reached by scholars on which factor should enter the governing factor system or which factor deserves more attention (Chang and Ive, 2002, Zhou and Ke, 2013). Furthermore, findings of existing studies have hardly been fully utilized or integrated to contribute to a more comprehensive and convincing system of governing factors.
On the other hand, construction projects in China have long been criticized for adopting the unitary traditional client dominating PDS with low delivery efficiency (Smith et al., 2004). Since reform and opening up from 1978, PDSs in China's construction industry have been gradually diversified to follow the international trend (Yong Qiang et al., 2010). Nevertheless, the imprint of planned economy on the perspectives of Chinese project management practitioners is slow to fade away (Xu et al., 2005). The deeply ingrained client dominating culture makes Chinese practitioners emphasize on rather different factors, such as “client's management ability”, compared to practitioners from developed countries in the market economy environment (Shi et al., 2014, Xiao-mei and Xiao-jun, 2011). Generally, Chinese clients are more prone to adopting DBB method for better project control (Smith et al., 2004). However, there is a lack of quantitative study on the perspective divergences.
This paper aims at bridging these gaps and is organized as follows. Firstly, in Section 2, we elaborate on the project condition factors, the project performance objective factors and the functioning mechanism by which PDS and project conditions contribute to project performance. Thereafter, perspective gaps between practitioners in China and developed countries are also reviewed to facilitate further discussions on this topic. Then in Section 3, factor identification and content analysis methodology are introduced. The system of factors governing PDS selection, composed of project conditions and project performance objectives, is constructed in Section 4. Thereafter, in Section 5, studies on projects in China and developed countries were reviewed to explore their perspective gaps quantitatively. This system, based on theoretical reasoning and content analyses on previous studies, identifies a more holistic list of governing factors and lays solid foundation for future studies on PDS selection. In Section 6, content analysis results are discussed to shed light on the underlying cause of the obvious characteristics of PDS in China and provide suggestions for Chinese practitioners on updating their management philosophy. Finally, conclusions, contributions and limitations are summarized in Section 7.
Section snippets
Literature review
Many scholars studied factors governing PDS selection in the context of different countries. Although whether a mutually exclusive set of influencing factors exists is still controversial (Luu et al., 2003a, Luu et al., 2003b, Luu et al., 2006, Skitmore and Marsden, 1988), numerous studies constructed various systems of influencing factors. Basically, the extent to which PDS accommodates the project conditions and the extent to which PDS aligns with the project performance objectives should be
Methodology
In order to comprehensively construct the system of governing factors, we identify the project condition factors and project performance objective factors separately, due to their inherent characteristics (Liu et al., 2015).
As for project performance objectives, there exist well recognized findings of studies on project performance objectives as mentioned above. Thus, the project performance objectives are directly integrated as the objectives of PDS selection into the system of governing
Factor system governing PDS selection
The project performance objective factors include project outcome performance factors i.e. on-time completion, within budget completion, and quality level, and project process performance factors i.e. risk control, price competition, responsibility and flexibility, as widely accepted in the literature (Ng et al., 2002).
The project condition factors were identified based on CSF literature as described in Section 3. For the sake of reflecting and integrating representative conclusions of existing
Data collection
Collecting importance evaluation data on factors from questionnaire respondents (which is the prevailing quantitative data collection method) has long been criticized for potential introduction of bias due to subjectivity. This problem can be serious especially when there is only a limited sample of respondents in individual studies (Chan, 2007, Chen et al., 2009, Ng et al., 2002). To address this problem, viewpoints in the literature can be utilized to reflect the perspectives of practitioners
Key governing factors considered by Chinese practitioners
According to Table 7, Chinese managers emphasize on “client's control ability and preference”, “client's risk attitude” and “client's project practice ability” in the category of client's internal project conditions.
“Client's control ability and preference” is the most prominent principal component containing 3 interactive factors. Generally, more experienced clients are more skilled in construction technology and prefer more control in projects. Currently in China's construction industry,
Conclusions
This paper, based on content analyses on PDS selection literature, builds up the system of factors governing PDS selection. We found that the governing factors include project condition factors and project performance objective factors, and practitioners in China and developed countries emphasize on rather different factors.
We analyzed the functioning mechanism of PDS on project performance, and found that PDS is chosen to adapt to internal and external project conditions to achieve project
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that there is no potential conflict of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Acknowledgments
The present study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (general programs 51479100, 51179086, 51379104) and grant (2015-KY-5, 2013-KY-5) from the State Key Laboratory of Hydroscience and Engineering.
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