A study of the factors affecting construction time in Western Australia

Abstract

Delays are major problems that face the Western Australia's construction industry. Delays can lead to many negative effects such as cost overruns, and is of high concern to those who are involved in the construction industry. This study was set to identify the major causes of delays in the Western Australian construction industry, by means of a literature review and a questionnaire survey. A total of 48 delay factors were obtained from literature review and were further categorised into eight major groups that contributed to the causes of delay. The questionnaire survey was distributed to the targeted respondents from a combination of clients, contractors, and consultants in Perth, Western Australia. About 32 respondents participated in the survey. Based on the data received, albeit limited, the top ten most important causes identified were: (1) Shortage of skills; (2) Financial difficulties; (3) Shortage of labour; (4) Unrealistic deadlines for project completion; (5) Unforeseen ground conditions; (6) Poor organization of the contractor or consultant; (7) Poor communication; (8) Underestimation of time of completion; (9) low speed of decision; and (10) Design errors made by designers.

Critical overrun causations in marine projects

“…Construction projects are usually influenced by overruns. Normative literature has illustrated the frequency and impacts of schedule overruns on stakeholders (Kenny and Vanissorn, 2012;Shebob et al, 2012). Furthermore, studies on overrun factors are prevalent (Kenny and Vanissorn, 2012;Tankkar and Wanjari, 2015).…”

“…Normative literature has illustrated the frequency and impacts of schedule overruns on stakeholders (Kenny and Vanissorn, 2012;Shebob et al, 2012). Furthermore, studies on overrun factors are prevalent (Kenny and Vanissorn, 2012;Tankkar and Wanjari, 2015). Most studies on the subject have used questionnaire surveys, indicating the causations are hard variables (Odeh and Battaineh, 2002;Chan and Kumaraswamy, 1997;Kaliba et al, 2009;Long et al, 2004;Sambasivan and Soon, 2007).…”

“…The importance of this is that project uniqueness will help understand the different dimensions to causations, how they are mitigated and how this process adds value to construction projects (Whyte and Cammarano, 2012). Kenny and Vanissorn (2012) used questionnaire survey to identify 10 delay factors in Western Australia's construction industry. Their findings include skill and labour shortages, financial difficulties, over-optimism in setting deadlines, unforeseen circumstances, stakeholders' poor organisation, absence of communication, planning errors, inappropriate decision processes and design and construction errors.…”

A Forecast and Mitigation Model of Construction Performance by Assessing Detailed Engineering Maturity at Key Milestones for Offshore EPC Mega-Projects

“…There are many existing publications dedicated to causes of profit losses and construction delays on international EPC mega projects: Asia [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16], Europe [17,18], Africa [19][20][21][22], Americas [23][24][25], and Australia [26,27]. Among the factors identified, the most common cause of project schedule and cost overrun was found to be poor design development prior to construction [5][6][7][8]12,13,[15][16][17][18][22][23][24]27].…”

“…Shrestha [24] studied the magnitude of construction costs and schedule delays based on the type, size, duration and completion years using statistical analysis. Sambasivan [6], Wong [27] and Habibi [23] hypothesized that design error and change is one of the major causes of delays through diverse data analysis techniques, such as a relative importance index ranking method, severe index, etc. Dosumu [22] indicated that about 36% of cost variation is caused by design errors, and recommended design maturity review prior to use to minimize design-error-induced variations.…”