Evaluation of a city project A case study investigating success factors at a city developer

Abstract

The trend is moving towards public and private actors collaborating in construction projects. Public actors are striving to take advantage of the private sectors strengths, in order to achieve better performance of projects. Going from arm’s length relationship to a close long-term strategic partnership, by sharing risks, costs and skills in order to create a win-win situation for both of the parties. Collaboration is a cornerstone for a successful project, where communication, teamwork, leadership, trust and common aims are some of the contributing factors for achieving successful collaboration. Quality, time and budget are also factors for a successful project. This report is investigating the collaboration and success factors for a built city area by a consortium of private and public actors. The case is at a public city developer which was working in a consortium to develop the city area and they worked by an appreciated collaboration model developed by the city developer. The empirical information has been gathered through internal documents and interviews from the involved actors. One part of the results deems the city developer as a good and experienced project leader, who knew what they wanted to achieve with the area. It existed a clear vision about the area, but that vision was forgotten during the progress of the project. The results of the report show that the communication functioned well and there was a general mutual commitment and level of ambition, except for one incident where two actors left the consortium in advance. Time and budget of the project did not reach the initial planning while the quality was high, though depending from which perspective one look at. Overall the collaboration was successful. Recommendations are presented to the case company and include; to better communicate the vision during the whole project and that all actors should be involved from beginning to the end. Regarding the quality factor, better social parameters could have been more included. Future research can investigate quality parameters in a more detailed way, together with research about the collaboration.