Empirical Analysis of Issue Management in Small Vertical Construction Projects: Relationship between Project Performance, Project Team Actions, and Issue Types

Abstract

Public institutions seek to maintain their built-environment assets by allocating sizable budgets to small construction projects that renovate or expand upon existing facilities. Small building construction projects are common in the public institutional sector, resulting in cumulative portfolios that are quite sizable for institutions to oversee. Like any other construction project, small building projects are fraught with issues that threaten to cause deviations (mostly negative) from their base cost, schedule, and quality. Therefore, even smaller magnitude of cost and schedule growth on projects, can quickly cumulate to millions of dollars and months of schedule delay across the entire portfolio. Project control techniques can be used reduce the impacts of negative performance outcomes. Previous studies indicate that these issues are commonly caused by owner factors, designer factors, contractor factors, and unforeseen circumstances, and are widespread in all type of construction irrespective of project type, owner type, procurement type, project delivery type, and project size. Despite their collective volume, relatively little research has focused on the performance of small building projects or investigated issue management practices within small building projects. This study aims to address the gap by analyzing the most common issues that occur during the construction phase of the small building construction projects, its impact on project performance outcomes, and the project team extent and consistency with which project teams utilize issue logs to monitor, control, and resolve issues. The study’s dataset consisted of 881 small building projects, including 5,236 individual issues that the project teams identified, monitored, and resolved during the construction phase. The results of this study shows that the most frequently occurring issues were designer and owner related. Design errors and omissions and unforeseen concealed conditions were typically identified and resolved the earliest in the schedule, whereas contractor-related issues were typically the last to be identified and resolved. Further, it was found that the different issues impacted the cost and schedule growth differently, where owner-caused scope changes and other internal issues within the owner organization were the primary causes of cost and schedule growth, whereas contractor-caused issues and unforeseen weather conditions were the least problematic causes. Lastly, it was found that on average project teams who practiced issue management implementation to a greater extent achieved a 3.1 to 4.3 percent reduction in cost growth and a 5.3 to 12.3 percent reduction in schedule growth, and the level of issue log usage during the first quartile of the project schedule was indicative of the project team’s behavior for the remainder of the project. This study adds to the body of knowledge by analyzing a relatively understudied topic of issue management in the literature, which is even scarcer in the small building construction projects. Furthermore, this study quantifies the project performance outcomes for different issues using a relatively larger sample size of 881 small building projects. These results can also help project teams by focusing on the issues that occur at a higher frequency and results in the greatest cost and schedule growth and thereby take proactive measures to minimize negative impacts to project performance. Moreover, project teams should be encouraged to establish their issue management practices early in the project schedule to encourage greater issue log usage for the remainder of the project for favorable project performance outcomes.