Due to the loss of financial resources and the need to optimize projects, academics, politicians and the construction industry have become increasingly aware of the challenges presented by the frequent time and cost overruns and reduced quality level of construction projects. The purpose of this study is to analyse the factors that project managers experience as having the greatest effect on time, cost and quality, and to discover whether the factors' effects are significantly different from each other. A questionnaire with 26 factors identified from interviews was sent to the full population of publicly employed project managers. Factors were ranked by using the relative importance index and tested for significant differences by applying the Friedman´s test with the Wilcoxon´s test as post-hoc analysis. From the analysis, the most affecting factor associated with time was found to be unsettled or lack of project funding. For the cost related factor, errors or omissions in the consultant material, was the most important. Finally, the quality related factor was errors or omissions in construction work. The main conclusion of this research showed that the project schedule, budget and quality level are significantly different affected. The project manager therefore cannot handle such critical issues by only focusing at schedule or budget related complication, either can the project manager assume that time, cost and quality are equally affected.

Purpose A construction project traditionally involves a variety of participants. Owners, consultants, and contractors all have diverse opinions and interests, but they all seek to ensure project success. Success is habitually measured as performance output regarding cost, time, and quality. Despite previous research mapping the success and failure factors, construction managers seem to have difficulty in attaining success. To provide clearer guidance on how to fulfill success criteria, the purpose of this paper is to identify the underlying factors that affect performance and thus project success in construction processes. Design/methodology/approach A questionnaire survey based on a literature review provided 25 key process factors divided into five key categories. Based on the responses from commonly involved construction parties, the factors were ranked and tested for significant differences between the parties. Findings The top five most important process factors were found to relate to the sharing of knowledge and communication. Moreover, testing the ranking for significant differences between owners, consultants, and contractors revealed five differences. The differences related to the interpretation and importance of trust, shared objectives, project coordination, and alternative forms of coordination. Originality/value All respondents identify improved knowledge sharing and communication as the key to improved cost, time, and quality performance and are therefore the areas where construction managers need to focus their resources. Thus, improved experience sharing and communication will increase the likelihood of project success, through improving competences, commitment, and coordination.

For decades construction labour productivity has been stagnated or declining. Changing this issue requires new knowledge on the labour-intensive construction production system. The work sampling method was applied to collect data from 3 renovation construction production systems. It quantifies observations of on-site work and enables deep analyses of how time is used. The analysis revealed that the renovation projects had a baseline of value-adding-work (VAW) time on 29.5%. It further identified 5 system behaviours outlining how VAW and Non-Value-Adding work (NVAW) time behaves. The new knowledge of how both VAW and NVAW time behaves advances knowledge on how time is wasted in construction projects and opens new branches of future research. The findings are furthermore of potential use to industry professionals who work with process improvement in renovation projects because they provide, among others, answers to how targets can be defined for both VAW and NVAW.

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Labor productivity in construction has fallen behind other industries in most of the world and has declined continuously for decades in the US. To change this, the construction industry needs to know where to focus. This research aims to show how important craftsmen efficiency is for national construction labor productivity (CLP) development. Statistical analysis was used to compare craftsmen efficiency and CLP data from North America (NA) in the period 1972-2010. Craftsmen efficiency data were extracted from published work that measured direct work (DW) through work sampling, and CLP data were extracted from national databases. A statistically significant relationship between DW and CLP was established. This revealed that adding 36 seconds of DW to every work hour could yield a yearly return of 5.4 billion USD to the NA gross domestic product (GDP). Results show that more focus on activity and project level efficiency is crucial for changing the trends of national CLP. Industry leaders and policy makers now have a solid foundation for taking corrective actions for an industry plagued by low productivity.