Identification of construction project problems and their impacts on project success

The traditionally accepted success parameters for construction projects are mainly cost and schedule. There are new trends in how to define success and the number of success parameters considered even though cost and schedule are still the most prevalent ones. The number and priority of success parameters heavily depends on the owner. With respect to these trends, determining the success of project is a hard and complicated procedure when a project faces multiple problems simultaneously. The problems that practitioners or researchers face are: (1) What are the relationships between these causes and their impacts on project success parameters?; (2) Is it necessary to concern all problems for each different project success parameter in terms of their negative impacts?; and (3) What problem is really considered when, especially, the project has more than one success parameter with different priorities? The proposed solutions are (1) to determine the relationships between problems and their impacts and (2) to select problems required to be considered for each project success parameter to meet multiproject success parameters within different priorities. This will help ensure that the project meets the required performance targets and adds value for all participants at the early phase of project. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) models were used for testing the quality of proposed solutions. The outputs of CFA were used for an application tool to select the most critical problems under given circumstances such as parameter priorities and problems severity. A single multi-attribute rating technique using swing (SMARTS) was the statistical tool used for this study. The results of this research show the selection of critical problem groups under given circumstances. In the future contractors, owners, and other project participants can use this technique to more effectively conduct project reviews during the course of the project.