is construction getting quicker?

Abstract

Construction time performance has been a frequent topic of discussion in the literature and government reports in which the performance of the UK construction industry has been reviewed. It is evident that construction duration is one of the measures by which the success of a project is measured and there has been a great deal of research to develop reliable methods of predicting construction duration. There has been significant research identifying factors which have an effect on the duration of a construction project but little research has been undertaken which considers the changes in construction duration over time. This paper reports on a desktop study considering project duration by collecting data from the Building Cost Information Service (BCIS) and modelled in a general linear model (GLM) and an analysis of variance (ANOVA) to investigate the relationships between the contributory factors for construction duration for projects constructed in the UK between 1995 and 2014. The paper draws a conclusion which suggests that the meeting of the targets set in Construction 2025 of a reduction of time by 25% is unrealistic is drawn; counter intuitively the duration of construction projects in the UK was seen to have increased between 1995 and 2014.