Nguyen, P H D; Tran, D Q and Bypaneni, S P K (2021) Exploring the impact of project size on design-bid-build and design-build project delivery performance in highways. Construction Management and Economics, 39(11), pp. 879-893. ISSN 01446193
Abstract
The highway construction industry has been increasingly using design-build (D-B) project delivery because of its documented benefits. Only limited studies, if any, have compared D-B and traditional design-bid-build (D-B-B) project performance based on the size of projects. The existing gap was addressed by investigating the cost growth, schedule growth, and construction intensity of highway projects delivered under D-B-B and D-B with the project sizes ranging from $2 million to greater than $100 million. These projects were collected from six state departments of transportations in the U.S. with mature D-B programs. Several statistics tests including t-test, Welch’s test, and Mann–Whitney U-test were used to analyze 3888 completed highway construction projects. The results show that D-B produced a lower cost growth than D-B-B in the project size of over $10 million while D-B-B projects had lower cost growth than D-B projects in the project size from $2 million to $10 million. D-B projects also produced less schedule growth than D-B-B projects across all groups of project size. D-B-B projects had a faster work pace than D-B projects in the project size from $2 million to $10 million. The findings contribute to the project delivery body of knowledge by reporting statistically empirical comparisons between D-B-B and D-B project performance controlled by the project size. The findings may help highway agencies better understand how D-B performs under the different sizes of projects in terms of cost growth, schedule growth, and construction intensity.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | construction intensity; cost performance; highway project delivery methods; project size; schedule performance |
| Index terms: | design-bid-build, delivery method, schedule growth, project performance, highway construction, project delivery, statistics, schedule performance, program, cost performance, body of knowledge, agency |
| Subjects: | sociology, delivery method, project controls, economics, civil engineering, software systems, project management theory and practice, project delivery, contractual arrangements, knowledge management, mathematical modelling |
| Topics: | Engineering Principles, Information Management, Research Practice, Project Management, Cost Management, Procurement, Digital Applications, Time Control |
| Descriptive scope: | 4 PCTA |
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