Causes of Delay in Road and Bridge Construction Projects in Vietnam

In Road and Bridge construction projects, delay could be defined as the time overrun either beyond completion date specified in a contract, or beyond the date that the parties agreed upon for delivery of a project. It is a project slipping over its planned schedule and is considered as common problem in construction projects. To the owner, delay means loss of revenue through lack of production facilities and rent-able space or a dependence on present facilities. In some cases, to the contractor, delay means higher overhead costs because of longer work period, higher material costs through inflation, and due to labor cost increases. Completing projects on time is an indicator of efficiency, but the construction process is subject to many variables and unpredictable factors, which result from many sources. These sources include the performance of parties, resources availability, environmental conditions, involvement of other parties, and contractual relations. However, it rarely happen that a project is completed within the specified time. The main purpose of this study is to identify the delay factors on road and bridge projects completion. A questionaire survey was conducted to solicit the causes of delay from clients, consultants, and contractors. This study indentified 5 most important causes of delay from a list of 39 different causes of delay. Five most important causes were: Slow land acquisition, Price fluctuation, Delay in progress payment by Owner, Poor site management & supervision by Contractor, Financial difficulties of Contractor. Finally, some solutions dealing with project delay problems in construction executing stages are proposedACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 2 ABSTRACT 3 LIST OF TABLES 6 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 7 1.1 Background 7 1.2 Motivation 7 1.3 Objectives of the Studies 8 1.4 Research Scope and Limitation 9 1.5 Structure of the Dissertation 9 CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW 10 CHAPTER 3 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 13 3.1 Research Approach 13 3.2 Questionaire Design 14 CHAPTER 4 DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS 24 4.1 Data Analysis approach 24 4.2 Spearman’s Rank Correlation 25 4.3 Research Finding and Result 26 4.3.1 General Characteristics of Respondents 26 4.3.2 Ranking of Delay Causes 26 4.3.3 Frequency of Delay Causes 27 4.3.4 Severity of Delay Causes 27 4.3.5 Importance of Delay Causes 32 4.4 Importance Rank Correlation 34 4.5 Indentified Five Most Important Causes of Delay 36 4.6 How to Solve Five Most Important Causes of Delay 37 4.6.1 Solution for Cause Slow Land Aquisition 37 4.6.2 Solution for Cause Price Fluctuation 37 4.6.3 Solution for Cause Delay Progress Payment by Owner 37 4.6.4 Solution for Cause Poor Site Management and Supervision by Contractor 38 4.6.5 Solution for Cause Financial Difficulties by Contractor 38 4.7 Discuss the results 39 4.8 Highlight the problems are mostly sourced from government 41 CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATION 42 5.1 Conclusion 42 5.2 Recommendations 42 REFERENCES44 APPENDIX 4