Starting From Scratch: A New Project Delivery Paradigm

Extensive research and published material exists addressing owner, contractor, and supplier relationships and contracting methods. Also, there exist a variety of capital project delivery systems in construction industry, which all aim at delivering projects to project owners with desired quality and within expected cost and schedule. These project delivery systems are predefined systems and processes each defined to address some of the many problems that keep owners of projects from achieving their desired results. Previous literature, however, indicates that the outcomes of applying these delivery processes are still disappointing to owners and not promising to a major part of the construction industry. The major objectives of this Construction Industry Institute (CII)-funded research were to identify an innovative approach to project delivery, challenge the industry and its customers to create conditions for ideal project delivery paradigm, and provide suggestions on how to approximate the ideal in imperfect conditions. The research objectives were attempted through a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods. A comprehensive review of existing literature in the field and creative thinking workshops were steps in the research to achieve the vision to the new ideal project delivery system and to develop the hypothesis. The hypothesis was then tested and validated through statistical analyses and case-study research. We concluded that superior project performance can be achieved by breaking existing paradigms and implementing organizational integration, alignment of interests, and management-by-means through new project delivery systems.