Project Owner Satisfaction Forecasting through Longitudinal Monitoring of Project Team Attributes

Abstract

Applying project team success to forecast a building project’s outcomes is challenging due to the presence of a large number of variables in building’s owner goals, program types, and project team composition. However, studying the dynamic interactions of team integration with the project outcomes, which can be represented by owner satisfaction, provides evidence of a meaningful relationship between the success of a project with regard to budget, quality, and schedule. Herein, the association of team integration and group cohesion with the success of project outcomes in terms of owner satisfaction is studied. This purpose was accomplished through regularly gathered information from project teams throughout the project design and construction, followed by the one-time after-completion survey of building owners to understand how and why snapshots of team interactions or dynamics lead to satisfaction perceived by owners. For the seven completed projects with different integration levels, building outcome was measured by owner satisfaction as a proxy for project success. The findings reveal that better team integration can lead to higher owner satisfaction, suggesting teams that are regularly rated high on factors related to strong team culture, such as, “clarity of role” and, “project manager leadership,” are also likely to be rated higher by owners for successful building outcomes. Additionally, projects with more consistent responses across survey categories are more likely to be rated highly by owners. This finding creates an opportunity for planning and managing teams. For those project teams who have been consistent and rated higher in their survey responses, we can expect higher levels of team integration, group cohesion, and, ultimately, owner satisfaction with the overall building results. Consequently, this study offers the potential for in-progress team dynamics measures to help forecast owners' perceptions of their project outcomes.