A Study on the impacts of the AD-HOC site instructions on building construction projects in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Construction projects are more and more complex, involving in complicated contractual procedures. Complex nature can lead to construction disputes. Contract disputes are unavoidable and Ad-hoc site instruction is one of the significant reasons which may lead to contract disputes. Lack of clarity in contract documents, unforeseen circumstances during the construction phase, Changes in the employer’s requirements etc. allow the Engineers to occasionally do alterations throughout the construction phase by providing the ad-hoc site Instructions as per their authority given in the contract administration. But, this prevailing practice of providing ad-hoc site instructions to contractors seems to over and over again be deficient in communicates the required instruction effectively to perform the construction activity. This study was a research on how ad-hoc site instructions impacted on building constructions in Sri Lanka. A detail literature review was done in order to understand the nature of the ad-hoc site instructions, causes of site instructions, wrong practices in the issuance of site instructions and the impact of the site instructions during the construction phase. Mixed method approach was adopted during the research study to achieve the objectives of the research. Five number of experts in the relevant subject were interviewed in 2 phases. After the first phase of expert interview, a representative sample of contract parties in the building construction projects that are registered with CIDA (successor to ICTAD) were surveyed. Gathered data was analysed using appropriate statistical analysis tools and the content analysis. Expert interview phase II was done to arrive the conclusions and recommendations. It was found that the project time delay and project cost overrun are the highly occurring outcomes due to the ad-hoc site instruction and those outcomes have significant adverse impacts on the building construction projects in Sri Lanka. Finally, strategies were developed to minimse the adverse impact of ad-hoc site instructions. The key themes of the developed strategies were knowledge improvement of construction practitioners, effective pre-contract management by the contract administrators, awarding the project to competent contractors and seriousness on engineers’ duty of care.