Exploring project participants’ satisfaction in the infrastructure projects

Abstract

Project participant’s satisfaction has been identified as an important factor of the project success. A well-functioning and high-quality infrastructure is essential for the functioning of the society. The purpose of this paper is to examine the project participants’ satisfaction in the infrastructure projects. The assessment method is a mutual project evaluation system that measures satisfaction from different project stakeholders. The study aims to find areas of development of the infrastructure projects by analysing the level of performance of different participants and to compare the results with the other types of the construction projects. The Finnish project evaluation database of over 200 projects was used to identify the project participants’ levels of performance and satisfaction. Statistical analysis was used to measure the project participants’ satisfaction with each other’s performance and to compare differences between the infrastructure projects with the housing and office projects. The result indicates that in the light of the project participants’ satisfaction, performance of the infrastructure projects has been evaluated at a lower level than other project types, especially by clients and contractors. It is notable that infrastructure projects differ slightly more from the residential housing projects than from the office projects. The results show that project participants in the infrastructure projects are less satisfied with each other’s performance. The study highlights that the infrastructure projects are unique and different, in which case the corresponding reproduction of the skills or repetition as in the residential projects do not occur. In other words, from one project to another, essential matters differ considerably, which emphasizes the project-specific adaptability and agility of the project participants to achieve project success.