Examining Construction Quality Supervision and Organization Procedures for BOT Projects by Comparing with DBB Projects

Adopting the BOT (build-operate-transfer) delivery method has brought opportunities and challenges in construction time and quality for urban infrastructure. Many studies investigate the upstream issues of BOT projects such as concessionaire selection criteria and risk factors. But the project execution becomes complicated such as the escalated quality supervision organization and procedure at the construction stage. This extra supervision may have constituted hidden redundancies as waste to economic sustainability. This paper investigated construction quality supervision of BOT projects to pinpoint adequate degree of supervision and detect redundant organization and procedures. The study adopted ten subway construction projects as cases in which five were from the traditional design-bid-build (DBB) and five from the BOT methods. Thirty six project participants including owners, contractors, designers, and concessionaire managers of the ten projects were interviewed to tell their views on these issues. The quality supervision measures of the DBB projects were used as the baseline and compared with those of the BOT projects. The research results show that the construction quality seems no difference for the DBB and BOT projects. Construction quality comes out of supervision but excessive supervision organization and procedures do not necessarily improve quality. This finding indicates that adequate degree of supervision is enough to achieve required quality to save immense paperwork for large construction projects.