After the Revolution: Understanding a Decade of Change in Project Delivery Systems and Their Impact on Project Performance

This document is a manual for the selection of project delivery systems (PDSs). This decision is by necessity both an early one – the selected PDS informs many of the procedural elements of a project (e.g., contract structure, timelines) – and a critical one – tailoring the selection of PDS to the project’s unique conditions can improve results. This manual is composed of four parts:

1. The concept file defines and discusses four principal PDSs to facilitate their understanding, define success, and provide recommendations:
   • Design-Bid-Build (DBB)
   • Design-Build/Engineer-Procure-Construct (DB/EPC)
   • Construction Management (CM)
   • Integrated Project Delivery (IPD)
   
   Within these four PDSs, the research team identified 11 subsystems: variants in ways of allocating responsibilities, contracting strategies, and/or relationships among project parties. However, no subsystem fundamentally altered its PDS to such a degree that it became a fifth PDS.
    
2. The decision support tool offers the reader a series of driving statements. Each statement takes the form of a declarative sentence, and this tool offers predictive scores beside each statement to help decision-makers winnow down the PDS options. The team derived these corresponding scores from industry data, but the tool includes instructions to facilitate using company-specific data as well, should the user wish to do so.
    
3. The third section is the subsystem selection tool. Once the decision-maker has selected a principal PDS, this tool helps narrow down the subsystems available for that PDS. Flowcharts modeled on the driving statements in the second section offer a model decision-tree approach to isolating the best combination of potential elements. Users are free to alter this tool to better reflect their needs as time goes on.
    
4. The final section is a performance analysis of the four principal PDSs. To be clear, since each subsystem remains part of its respective PDS, comparing one PDS to another compares all of the subsystems within each PDS to each other within the context of this book. By using a performance metric called the Project Performance Score (PPS), the research team compared the relative performance of PDSs on a variety of projects. IPD was found to be the best-performing on average, followed by CM, DB/EPC, and DBB in that order. The team also performed other comparisons to determine the relative success of each PDS in terms of key performance metrics, including but not limited to cost growth, rework, and schedule growth.
    

As it studied the performance data presented in the analysis section, the research team was surprised to see the lack of adoption of IPD in the DCC sector, especially given that previous CII research had created the Integrated Industrial Project Delivery (I2PD) framework specifically for this purpose. This team found that the DCC sector has an abundance of projects which are well suited to IPD (as shown by the PDS selection tools in this book) and urges DCC leaders and decision-makers to consider using IPD on future projects.