Identifying Success Factors in Construction Projects: A Case Study

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Morris and Hough discussed project success in terms of project functionality (did the project perform?), project management (the “iron triangle”), contractors’ commercial performance, and project cancellation (where relevant).

Thus, a project such as the Sydney Opera House or the Scottish Parliament, famously over budget and late, but producing iconic buildings, might be considered unsuccessful in efficiency but effective; Samset's Norwegian off-shore torpedo battery (on time and on budget but closed down by Parliament a week after opening) could be described as successful in efficiency terms, but unsuccessful in impact, relevance, and sustainability.

The necessity of engaging stakeholders and their view of project success become even more important in cases in which project execution requires developmental input from both the purchaser and supplier or from many stakeholders, such as the value co-creation in major defence projects. A comprehensive literature survey in Davis shows the evolution of the idea of project success over successive decades and shows little commonality between the definitions of senior management, project teams, and project recipient stakeholders.

“Some conceptualize [‘project success’] as a unidimensional construct concerned with meeting budget, time and quality…whereas others consider project success a complex, multi-dimensional concept encompassing many more attributes”. But what is project success? Steiner's (1969) definition of a project included: “Projects generally involve large, expensive, unique or high risk undertaking which have to be completed by a certain date, for a certain amount of money, within some expected level of performance”. It is clear that without an adequate definition of project success, the performance of a company over a program of projects cannot be assessed.

Project Success and the Company

The company would not necessarily have known all this academic literature; indeed the concept of the “iron triangle” is so embedded in the project management culture generally that there is a line of argument that the prevailing culture limits project managers from thinking outside of this sub-concept of project success. The success of the project was narrowed down into four questions with seventeen vital points to be marked in the success of a project.

Success Factors: The Literature

Shenhar and Dvir in particular, show how determining success factors in all projects is context-dependent, and build up a structure of contexts involving the extent of the project's Novelty, Technology, Complexity, and Pace (the well-known four-dimensional “diamond” model). Cooke-Davies looks to answer not only “what factors lead to project success?” but also “what factors lead to a successful project?” and “what factors lead to consistently successful projects?” The last factor is reflected in the findings that follow.

In more complex and ill-defined projects, such as IT systems projects, the factors-based approach has been considerably criticized, because of the difficulty in definition; lack of empirical validation; clarity between “factors” and “concerns”; prescriptiveness; and, of course, the difficulty in defining success, who concludes that these issues “strongly suggest that the approach has not been successful”.

Liu, Love, Smith, Regan, and Davis analysed the normative literature on PPP success factors to derive a set of factors within the different lifetime phases of PPP infrastructure projects, with different success factors within the initiation/planning phase, the procurement phase, and the partnership phase. Looking at the situated context is also important, because research can be seen to have often identified and sometimes theorized success factors; however, there is little discussion about the “how”—looking at the causality of producing project success.

Case Findings

Company culture was seen above to be a key factor and is the subject of the first diagram; the second concentrates on a smaller area, the “Single Team”; the third map covers the project setup, which was also seen above as important; then two smaller areas have been put into separate maps for ease of reading: customer satisfaction and subcontractors and the construction site; the final map covers post-handover.

Company Culture:

The company is less layered than usual, with teams reporting directly to the Board, meaning that more trust is placed in the empowered site based project managers and managers can work flexibly, sometimes doing work that properly lies in each other's territories. One is the locality of the company: it is based in (and well-known in) the city; Hull is an east-coast city, somewhat geographically isolated within the United Kingdom, meaning that there is a strong sense of identification with the city and a close-knit community; the effect of being a local company in Hull is greater than that in a less isolated city.

Finally, company culture leads to a site culture, including “skip level” management where each employee is encouraged to meet with the Managing Director, without his or her line management. From these factors follow many ramifications: One implication of the locality, as a fairly isolated city, is that the management of the company has been stable rather than transient. This is supported by each director participating in advertised “back to the floor” days and attending sites across the company estate to work actively within the business at the site level.

The company engenders respect from subcontractors as they are seen to be delivering and averaging payment times markedly lower than tender expectations, resulting in the company being able to demand performance from subcontractors and their best (even requesting named) operatives. There is more individual concern for the company reputation within employees (as indicated by company questionnaires), and individual managers feel a personal investment in the projects, leading to more customer engagement. The company culture starts with leadership from the managing director, exhibiting similar characteristics and similar causal outcomes as those described in Pillai and Meindl.

There is a noticeably high interest within the Company Board in project execution, known to be a success factor in projects.

The Single Team:

Through this greater collaboration and consistency, “learning teams” were formed, which naturally get together