Istrazivanja i projektovanja za privreduJournal of Applied Engineering Science

AN OVERVIEW OF THE RELATIONS WITHIN THE IRON TRIANGLE ON A SAMPLE OF CONSTRUCTION PROJECTS IN CROATIA


DOI: 10.5937/jaes0-54493 
This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY 4.0
Creative Commons License

Ksenija Tijanić Štrok*
University of Rijeka, Faculty of Civil Engineering, Radmile Matejčić 3, Rijeka, Croatia

The construction project's success generally implies completion within the planned deadline and budget and satisfactory quality performance. These three project performance parameters form the basic system of measuring its success - the iron triangle of project management. Unfortunately, construction projects often fail to meet the defined success parameters, one or more. The focus of this paper is the territory of Croatia, for which it was noticed that no comprehensive studies analyze the construction projects' success in terms of all three iron triangle parameters. This paper aimed to observe an extensive database of projects from Croatia, analyze their success in terms of time, costs, and construction quality, and determine the mutual relations between those three parameters. Based on a database of 49 construction projects, it was determined that a significant number of projects (46.94%) were not satisfactory regarding time and cost success. At the same time, problematic quality performance was less common (20.41%). Statistically significant correlations were established between the performance of time and cost. Developing reliable mathematical models for predicting real construction time and cost is also possible. As for the construction quality, the problem of its presentation and assessment has been established, and no statistically significant results have been determined by observing it. These results indicate the need for further research, primarily regarding the project performance quality. The overall results emphasize the importance of comprehensive, systematic and timely construction project management, primarily during the planning and execution phases, to achieve its goals.

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This work has been fully supported by the University of Rijeka under the project ‘’Analysis of exceeding the planned costs of construction projects in the execution phase’’. Project number: uniri-mladi-tehnic-23-59.

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