An inquiry of conditions and criteria associated with Green Building project success

Buildings are an extremely important part of the built environment as they fulfil the requirements of human life on a daily basis in terms of living and working. However, services from buildings come at a cost as the building and construction sector tends to consume large amounts of resources and therefore negatively impacts the environment. With an increased understanding of environmental degradation, society is starting to show more acceptance towards Green Buildings. These buildings tend to be much more environment-friendly, socially habitable and economically affordable in the long term. To sustain increased development of such projects, attention should be given to the Success conditions which enable aspired project outcomes and Success criteria against which the project performance is evaluated. Most existing studies have not focused on identifying Success conditions and criteria specific to Green Building projects. There is also a dearth of research focused towards interrelationships within Success conditions and Success criteria. This limits the use of previous research on Green Building development practices. Focusing on office buildings, this thesis investigates how Green Building development can be managed to achieve successful project outcomes. This research takes into account the special requirements of Green Buildings as well as the Success criteria and Success conditions of Green Buildings. This research used the theoretical lens of Project Success, Sustainability, Complexity perspective and the Transformation-Flow-Value-generation theory. An exploratory and explanatory mixed-methods research design is used. This research design relies on a multi-regional survey of 104 Green Building professionals and 75 semi-structured interviews in Australia, Hong Kong, Pakistan, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom. To interpret the data and test the reliability of findings, qualitative and quantitative analysis are conducted on interview and survey findings. Results show that Green Buildings are significantly different from traditional buildings primarily because of their complexity, design methodology, and team collaboration. Project management performance (that is, Schedule, Cost, and Quality) in Green Buildings is interrelated with sustainability performance. Good project management tends to associate with high sustainability performance in Green Buildings. Results also confirm the fact that successful Green Buildings are mainly those which meet the end-users needs and client’s requirements and at the same time have reduced environmental effects. Results also demonstrate that success in Green Buildings is generally associated with socio-technical conditions. To achieve success in Green Building development it is necessary to have proficient project teams and clients, high collaboration among the team, highly committed project team and client, rigorous project planning, timely execution of activities, and rigorous process of defining goals. These conditions help realise success in Green Buildings by resulting in value for the project client and reducing the non-value adding activities during project development. For practice related to Green Buildings, the findings of this research will allow project decision-makers to have a more holistic range of criteria to judge the project performance and make decisions related to project development. Clients and project teams can consider the wide range of identified conditions to optimise project performance and achieve successful project outcomes. The Success conditions and criteria can also be considered by Green Building certification systems in their credit lists to ensure a higher correlation between certification and success. Theoretically, the findings can inform future research focused on Green Building project development. This will ultimately result in the more efficient development of Green Building projects that help reduce the effects of climate change as well as resource depletion.