Performance Evaluation of Clients &Consultants through Contractor Satisfaction on Building Projects

Abstract

Performance of building projects is generally evaluated on the basis of in time completion, within allocated cost, and achieving required quality standards. In recent years, satisfaction has also been established as an important indicator of project performance. Satisfaction and participant’s feeling of fulfillment from the performance of other project members. This research is based on the survey of 57 building projects based on traditional procurement method to acquire the contractor’s feedback regarding performance of clients and consultants, in Islamabad and Rawalpindi region. From past literature review, the contractor’s satisfaction factors and their indicators are adopted. Three important factors, (a) scope and deliverables, (b) communication and coordination, and (c) financial control and issues handling are introduced to evaluate client’s performance. The results reveal that 23% of contractors are overall dissatisfied with the performance of clients on building projects. The critical factors came out for the contractors are communication and coordination of the client with other stakeholders, and client’s financial stability and their project issues handling at building sites. Other significant areas of concern are client’s authority to relax specifications, overall project site conditions, client flexibility towards project issues, and frequent changes in the project scope. Consultant’s performance is assessed for (a) competency and experience, (b) availability and quality of drawings, (c) cooperation of site staff, (d) verification of the bills, and (e) issues and disputes avoidance. The statistics showed that 19% contractors have shown overall dissatisfaction. Consultant’s timely availability and quality of drawings received low satisfaction level from the contractors. They have shown lack of satisfaction with the consultant’s supervisory staff acceptance of mistakes, their approval procedures of submittals and shop drawings, and timely verification of variations and escalation claims. Additionally, multiple linear regression was carried out to establish the relationship between overall contractor satisfaction level (i.e., dependent variable) and satisfaction factors (i.e., independent variables). The results showed that the client’s financial control and issues handling, and consultant’s site staff cooperation were the significant factors to achieve an overall contractor high degree of satisfaction. Finally, the approach of this research is useful to the clients and engineering consulting firms for identifying and improving on their weak areas to enhance the quality of services for their contractors.