Editorial Comment:

Abstract: Winch et al. (1998) have defined the mission of project management as the minimisation of client surprise. They point out that a surprised client is a dissatisfied client and argue for a gap analysis approach towards total project quality. Effective project teams should of course achieve, through synergy, service quality greater than the sum of the individual parts. However, how does one measure service quality, either of the project team or of the individual professionals? The objective of the research reported in this paper is to devise a multiple item scale for assessing quality in a UK construction profession context.