Public project delay monitoring by implementation coordination unit

Malaysian government places high priority on the construction industry by allocating 60 percent from the total allocation for physical development of public project delivery. However, 113 on-going project are delayed and facing shortfalls in spending expenditure. Thus, it is important that these delay and over-budget problems being tackled by the Implementation Coordination Unit (ICU), who coordinates and monitors the implementation of the public projects. Hence, this paper is undertaken with the aim of evaluating the effectiveness in monitoring delayed pubic projects by ICU. This aim is achieved via objectives of identifying the causes of public project delay based on the monitoring by ICU, examining the monitoring tools currently used by ICU in monitoring public project delay, and proposing improvement measures for effective monitoring of the public project delay by ICU. Data was collected via document review, which is subsequently validated via questionnaire survey on the purposive sample of 16 monitoring officers at ICU and analysed via Microsoft Excel. It is found that the main causes of delayed public projects are contributed by contractor-related followed by project implementation-related, utility-related, land and site-related problems. Project monitoring systems currently used by ICU are Project Monitoring System II (PMS II) and Integrated Project and Tracking Analysis Updates (iPANTAU), which are claimed by the respondents as effective to identify and solve the problem of public project delay. The top proposed improvement measure for PMS II and iPANTAU are developing contractor score rating system based on their performance in PMS II and improve competency of monitoring officers, particularly on identifying the causes of delay before keying in the data into iPANTAU, respectively. This paper is expected to enhance the efficiency of these systems by providing accurate information needed to the stakeholders