Construction delays in Sri Lanka: perspective of major participants

Abstract

Delay can be defined as a slipping over the scheduled construction duration beyond the agreed completion date. Notwithstanding the all project participants suffer from inevitable consequences originated from construction delays, they all themselves influence to engender delays in more or less portions while contractors, consultants and employers conclusively afford massive deal. Therefore, this research tends to investigate the causes of delays from the perspective of responsible parties thereby suggest solutions to avoid them. Initially the researchers conducted a comprehensive literature review to identify the causes of project delay. A total of 50 previously conducted researches were examined and 130 delay causes were found. Thereafter, 59 of the delay causes which frequently stand in Sri Lankan building construction context were filtered and responsible parties were recognised through opinions of 15 experts. Thence, the main questionnaire survey was carried out adapting 30 samples for each perspective of contractor, consultant and employer in order to identify the significance of delay causes by ranking them in each of the perspectives utilising Relative Importance Index (RII). The agreement between perspectives for the ranking was obtained from Spearman’s Rank Correlation Coefficient (rs) and Kendall’s Correlation of Concordance (W). Thereafter, the preventive measures to enrich responsibilities of major participants in order to avoid delays were explored through ten interviews. Consequently, the study revealed that the contractor is the most responsible party for construction delays. Eventually, the strategic framework was developed to enrich responsibilities of the major participants on avoiding construction delays ameliorating elicited facts from the study thereof.