The study data is from a 1,000 employee public works engineering bureau that is responsible for the planning,design, and construction management ofcapital improvement projects for a large city in the western United States. Two hundred and forty-three projects including municipal facilities, stormwater, sewer, and street projects were studied in this analysis ofcommunication impacts.The construction costs of the projects ranged from $25,000 to $15,000,000, and
completion dates were between July 1993 and May 1999.The projects all had multidiscipline design requirements (civil and other) and all established project teams.The teams consisted of the primary discipline design squad, additional discipline designers,oversight program managers,and client agency contacts.The level ofcommunication,however,varied within these project teams from project to project. Communication Measures
In order to test the research hypothesis, measures of communication (in terms of information distribution and human understanding) were established. In this analysis, communication effectiveness was measured across four planes—two related to information distribution and two related to human understanding and teamwork. The two