Comparative Analysis of Project Performance Between Different Project Delivery Systems

Project Delivery System (PDS) defines the relationship and timing of involvement between different contracting parties. The main PDSs referred to in cited literature are: Design-BidBuild (DBB), Construction Management at Risk (CMR), Design-Build (DB), and Integrated Project Delivery (IPD). By applying statistical tests such as Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) F-test and Kruskal-Wallis H-test to a dataset of 109 projects, this paper compares the performance of the four PDSs. As a result, statistically significant performance differences among the examined PDSs were identified in five performance areas: cost, schedule, quality, communication, and change management. Furthermore, performing pairwise comparisons using post-hoc statistical tests to each pair of PDSs shows that DBB performs markedly worse than the other examined PDSs, especially IPD. The findings presented in this paper should encourage industry professionals to move away from the DBB model, and towards IPD and other synergic PDSs.