Abstract 6

Time Overrun Trends in the Construction Industry of Pakistan – An Assessment of the Contributing Organizational Factors

Delay is generally acknowledged as the most common, costly, complex and risky problem encountered in construction projects. Because of the overriding importance of time for both the Owner (in terms of performance) and the Contractor (in terms of money), it is the source of frequent disputes and claims leading to lawsuits. Results of a former study conducted by the lead author on the causes and allocation of delays in construction projects in Pakistan identified that the major share of responsibility for overall delay causes was taken by construction contractors. This study hypothesizes that the behavior of an individual contracting organization would be different in some respects when dealing with the factors causing delays. Larger, more experienced firms as well as firms which are well equipped with management tools can perform better in situations to minimize time overruns as compared to new, inexperienced firms. Similarly, the amount of work in hand, nature of work, size of project, project type and funding patterns may also largely affect the overall time overrun on the project. Based on the above hypothesis, a study has been conducted to determine the effect of these parameters on the time overruns in projects. For this study, construction contracting organizations were focused and data were collected for the planned and actual time durations of several projects as well as for various organizational parameters in order to assess the trends of time overruns. This paper presents the findings of the study.

Analysis of the results shows a comparison of time overrun trends among the different classifications of the contractors (with respect to size, experience, amount of work in hand, etc.). It is expected that the results of the study will be helpful in determining the time overrun patterns of these organizations; moreover, these results can be useful for the owners in the selection process of the organizations for their future projects.