Project Outcome Forecasting through Longitudinal Monitoring of Project Team Attributes

Applying project team success to forecast building’s project outcomes is a challenging task 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 provides evidence of a meaningful relationship between the success of a project in regards 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 during the project progress in addition to the one-time after completion survey of building owners to understand how and why snapshots of team interactions or dynamics lead to project success. For the seven completed projects with different Class categories in terms of project delivery decisions that influence the potential level of integration, building outcome was measured by owner satisfaction which directly reflects the level of project success. The findings reveal that better team collaboration and cohesion can lead to better project outcomes, suggesting teams that regularly rated high on a number of 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 team: for those project teams who have been consistent and higher in their survey responses, we can expect higher levels of team integration, group cohesion, and, ultimately, owner satisfaction with the overall building results. As a result, this study offers the potential for in-progress measures of team dynamics to help forecast project outcomes.