Factors Affecting Time Overrun in Construction Projects in Bhutan

Younten Tshering ,Sangay Wangmo ,Rigzin Choden ,Tshewang Lhendup

doi:10.7176/jep/11-29-01

Abstract

The construction industry has a significant influence on the economy of a country as it plays a vital role in its development. However, construction projects in countries usually faced time and cost overrun, affecting the economic development and overall performance of the contractors. As infrastructure development is one of the key activities in developing countries, it is very important to analyze the factors contributing to time overrun to enable effective contract management. Time overruns are always associated with cost overrun often putting burden to country’s capital resources. Although time overruns have been recurring issues in construction industry, very little or no researches have been carried out in Bhutan so far. This paper presents a case study of time overrun of construction projects in Bhutan. The study was carried out through an online questionnaire consisting of thirty-one factors which are further sub-divided into seven categories. The one hundred twenty responses were analyzed using relative importance index which shows that inexperienced and financial instability of the contractor, incompetence of human resources, shortage and inefficient equipment, lack of construction materials are significant factors affecting time overrun. Issues related to sub-contracting, unrealistic calculation of the project duration, delay in the mobilization of machines are minor factors of time over-run of the construction projects in Bhutan. Keywords: Time overrun, principle factors, factor analysis, adversity, average index.s DOI: 10.7176/JEP/11-29-01 Publication date: October 31 st 2020

Highlights

The construction industry is one of the key contributing sectors to Bhutan’s economy
(2007) was adopted to rank factors based on their affliction on the time overrun in the construction projects
The factors have been ranked based on the perspectives received from the respondents, which are directly proportional to their adversity, which means those factors having higher relative importance index (RII) values are causing a higher impact on the time overrun of the construction projects

Summary

Introduction

The construction industry is one of the key contributing sectors to Bhutan’s economy. It constituted 15.87% of the GDP in 2017 and 16.28% in 2018 (NSB, 2018). This contribution to the economy is further added by the construction industry's potential to improve people's livelihood (CDB, 2019). Infrastructure that connects people, ease the livelihoods and are the growth of development that has the potential to change the lives of communities at home are behind schedule and often miss deadlines (Kuensel, 2017). Building a significant construction project without experiencing schedule delays and cost overruns is often the exception (Subramani, Prabhu, & Dey, 2016)

Methods

Results

Conclusion