Using Project Team Integration to Predict Cost and Schedule Performance in Public Transportation Projects

Project team integration is attracting interest in public projects due to the increasing success and popularity it has in the private sector of the construction industry. Public transportation projects must follow state and federal regulations for the method of procurement and delivery of a transportation project. Many traditional methods invoke more competition rather than cooperation resulting in adversarial relationships as oppose to integrated teams. Team integration incorporates differentiable goals between the major project participants into a cohesive and cooperative team and sustains the relationship under an atmosphere built on cooperation, trust, and collaboration. This study aims to measure the level of project team integration using relational contracting norms to compare to cost and schedule performance from completed transportation projects. Relational contracting norms measure the degree of perception that transportation agencies have towards the condition of the contractual relationship. With the use of a survey questionnaire and follow-up interviews, the research team collected integration measures along with project cost and schedule data from recently completed transportation projects. The collected data was evaluated using statistical correlation and regression techniques to test the assumption that an integrated project team (project integration) can impact the cost and schedule of a project as well as predict the performance of cost and schedule. The findings illustrate that project team integration correlates and can predict the change in cost performance, but project team integration does not relate significantly to schedule performance. These preliminary results provide evidence that having a team work together, cooperate, and trust one another can impact the cost performance of a transportation construction project.