Causes of delay in public sector construction projects in Saudi Arabia - Research Proposal Example

ave been increasingly plagued by lengthy and frequent delays that seem to have become more prevalent after the regulatory reform and subsequent construction company-restructuring of the early and mid-1990s. To improve this situation, there has been increased research interest in identifying the different factors that could cause these delays. One of the main policies and goals of public sector construction is the upgrading of project performance; including completion of projects within time and budget constraints and reduction of costs (Alzeban & Sawan, 2013).

In addition, execution and completion time is one of the most important performance measures in the public construction sector. However, the construction industry is subject to the influence of unpredictable factors and changing variables, which could potentially cause project completion delays (Pretorius, 2012). There is a need to understand these causes of delay in order to save public money by identifying potential mitigating actions. Delay in the proposed project refers to overrun time beyond the specified data of completion regardless of whether the government grants extension time.

Chidambaram et al. (2012) state that there is an increase in public construction project delays and cost, noting the need to investigate the different categories of causes that are responsible for cost overruns and time delays in public-funded projects. The authors argue that this is necessary to ascertain whether current measures put in place to mitigate project delays are valid. Consequently, the researchers reviewed questionnaire survey responses from forty-one previous studies investigating the causes of construction delays.

They find that respondents across the forty-one studies reported over 100 causes for project execution and completion delays, which they were able to group into 18 categories (Chidambaram et al., 2012). Nevertheless, they caution that researchers used widely different ranking systems, resulting in