A Comparative Study on the Performance of Traditional and Collaborative Construction Projects

Since the emergence of collaborative project delivery models, there has been some anecdotal evidence on the superiority of their performance results compared to the construction projects delivered through traditional delivery models. In this regard, this study aims to investigate and compare the performance of traditional and collaborative building construction projects in terms of time, cost, quality, safety, and the constructed building’s energy consumption in the use phase. To do so, the required data were collected through a web-based survey from project practitioners in Finland, Norway, Bahrain, Iran, USA, UK, and Australia. According to the findings, the addressed collaborative construction projects in this study seem to outperform the traditional ones in terms of project’s time and cost performance and constructed building’s energy consumption in the use phase. In terms of quality and safety, however, the average performance of addressed traditional construction projects in this study seems to be slightly better than the collaborative ones. Overall, it seems that both traditional and collaborative construction projects have the potential to meet their basic targets in terms of time, cost, quality, and safety in the project life cycle and the energy consumption in the use phase of the constructed facility. There are, however, some factors like the complexity of the project, collaboration, and competence of the project team which can greatly affect that potential. As the findings of this study are based on a relatively small sample of collaborative and traditional projects from different countries, further research with a bigger sample size is strongly recommended.