Measuring the Impacts of the Delivery System on Project Performance: Design-Build and Design-Bid-Build.
Measuring the Impacts of the Delivery System on Project
Performance: Design-Build and Design-Bid-Build.
(915 K)
Thomas, S. R.; Macken, C. L.; Chung, T. H.; Kim, I.
NIST GCR 02-840; 105 p. November 2002.
Sponsor:
National Institute of Standards and Technology,
Gaithersburg, MD
Keywords:
construction; design-build; design-bid-build; project
delivery system; practice use; performance outcomes;
performance norms; fast tracking
Abstract:
This study, sponsored by the National Institute for
Standards and Technology (NIST), was designed to meet
two objectives: to produce a comprehensive information
set that documents the impacts of the project delivery
system on project outcomes, and to provide the
construction industry a means by which it may measure
and evaluate the economic value of the design-build and
the design-bid-build project delivery systems. The study
consisted of four tasks. The first was a statistical
analysis of a broad cross-section of projects from the
Construction Industry Institute TM (CII TM) Benchmarking
and Metrics (BM&M) database. The second was to tabulate
key database characteristics and important fmdings from
the Task 1 statistical analysis. Task 3 was the
statistical analysis and tabulation of four subsets of
projects from the CII database: by sector, industry
group, cost category, and project nature. The fourth
task was the preparation and delivery of this technical
report, which synthesizes the fmdings from Tasks 1-3 of
this research effort. The analytic data set is comprised
of all U.S. domestic and international projects
submitted by owners and contractors between 1997 and
2000 using versions 2.0 through 6.0 of the CII
Benchmarking and Metrics questionnaire. Using
information reported on the BM&M questionnaire, both
owner and contractor-submitted projects were classified
as either designbuild (DB) or design-bid-build (DBB)
projects. The results were presented for both owner and
contractors in tables that compared DB and DBB projects
overall and by each of the four subsets of projects.
The results of this study show that on average DB
projects were about four times larger than DBB projects
in terms of project cost. Public sector projects made
less use of the DB project delivery system than private
sector projects. Industrial projects made greater use of
DB than did building projects. Overall, owner-submitted
DB projects outperformed DBB projects in cost, schedule,
changes, rework, and practice use, although
statistically significant differences were found only
for schedule, changes, rework, and practice use.
Contractor-submitted DB projects overall outperformed
DBB projects in changes, rework, and practice use, but
the difference was statistically significant only for
change performance. Contractor-submitted DBB projects
overall outperformed DB projects in schedule, and the
difference was statistically significant. Preproject
planning and project change management practice use had
the greatest impacts on cost performance for
owner-submitted DB and DBB projects. Team building
practice use had the greatest schedule performance
impact on owner-submitted DB projects. Project change
management and team building practice use had the
greatest impacts on contractor-submitted DB project
performance. Project change management occurred most
frequently as the practice that had the greatest
performance impact among contractor-submitted DBB
projects.
Building and Fire Research Laboratory
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Gaithersburg, MD 20899