Construction Planning Efficiency and Delivery Time Performance: Analysing Failure in Task-Level ‘Hit Rates’

Construction project delivery is considered successful by contracting firms if scope, time, cost, and quality outputs are attained, with any shortcomings in one or more of these representing a failure of sorts. Focusing only on the criteria of 'time', it is noticeable that more recent research efforts have been concentrated on poor time predictability and performance aggregated at construction ‘industry-level’, but minimal attention is retained on planning efficiency at individual ‘project-level’. Yet it is precisely because time performance enactment of individual ‘projects’, and their ‘project phases’, ‘work packages’, and ‘construction tasks’ remains unsatisfactory that predictability of time at an industry level is also recorded as poor. The main aim of this work therefore was to advance the discussion of construction planning efficiency via an analysis of time performance on a small range of recently, and nearly, completed construction projects. Data were obtained from a convenience sample of several major UK contracting organisations, which allowed quantitative analysis to be employed by measuring planning- and delivery- efficiencies. The paper contributes through an explanation of the methods used, and discussion of the findings, which show how in this sample, planning and delivery efficiency is worse than previously considered, with an average of only 38% of project activities starting on and finishing on time. Evidencing such time-performance failure should inform further project- level predictability and productivity research.