Comparative Analysis between Project Delivery Systems through Quantitative Assessment of Project Performance

Project delivery system (PDS) defines the relationship and timing of involvement between different contracting parties. Traditional PDSs referred to in cited literature are: design-bid-build (DBB), construction management at risk (CM), and design-build (DB). More recent studies, including this paper, add a fourth PDS: integrated project delivery (IPD). Existing PDS literature has claimed that increased PDS collaboration results in performance improvement. However, these studies have either studied the performance differences among the three traditional PDSs, or compared the performance of IPD to the three traditional ones collectively. Very limited research has examined the statistical performance differences between the four PDSs. By collecting quantitative data from 109 real-world projects, and applying statistical methodologies such as analysis of variance (ANOVA), Kruskal-Wallis H test and related post-hoc tests, this paper illustrates that PDSs significantly differ in 10 performance metrics spanning five performance areas: cost, schedule, quality, communication, and change management. Furthermore, the findings of this paper demonstrate the poor performance of DBB as compared to the superior performance of more collaborative PDSs, specifically IPD.