Non-excusable delays in construction

Existing literature and research findings indicated that delays are common amongst construction projects in many countries across the globe. Delays can be caused by one or more of the following: the client (excusable with compensation); force majeur or third party (excusable delays without compensation); or the contractors (nonexcusable delays or contractor responsible delays). Previous studies cited that approximately 50% of these delays can be classified as non-excusable delays. The root-causes (or factors) that cause non-excusable delays identified in these studies however, are given no detailed attention. Improving and constantly monitoring the factors causing non-excusable delays can help to determine and improve contractor's performance. This research explores issues related to the factors causing non-excusable delays. It includes establishing indicators to identify these factors and appropriate corrective actions. The research also develops an indicator that offers an alternative to intuitive judgement which can provide a consistent and standardised assessment of qualitative factor. The proposed indicator employs both quantitative and qualitative measures to evaluate qualitative factor which caused non-excusable delays. A correct determination of the root-causes (or factors) of non-excusable delays is vital for deriving an appropriate corrective action. This study offers a method of identifying these root-causes as well as identifying and establishing their corrective actions, a structured approach of deriving corrective actions was also developed. This approach was tested in a survey and proved to be consistent with the opinion of twenty nine contracting organisations. One of the significant contributions in this research was the development of an alternative indicator to assess "communication performance" using the concept of fuzzy logic control. The establishment of the common indicators that were used to identify the critical factors is another important achievement for this research. Fifteen critical factors were established and the findings indicate that resources schedule was the most effective indicators used to identify majority of the factors under consideration. Apart from the knowledge contribution in the subject of delays, the methodology employed to identify the factors of non-excusable delays using cause-and-effect analysis has helped to generate additional factors that previous studies did not focus on.