Factors causing design changes in Vietnamese residential construction projects: An evaluation and comparison

Abstract

Most of the construction projects in Vietnam are suffering from the design changes during the implementation phase. These changes have a significant impact on the time and cost of the project. The primary purpose of this study is to explore factors causing the design change of residential construction projects from the Vietnamese perspective. This study has used a questionnaire to collect data for the occurrence and effect of these factors on project performance. Based on the literature review, there are a total of 28 initial factors filtered. These factors were classified into four cases: environment, clients, consultants, and contractors. The results of the analysis showed that there is almost no difference in mean between groups of respondents, and there is a relatively high consensus in ranking the factors between project parties. Based on factor analysis, there are four principal components extracted from all initial factors, with total variance explained of nearly 65.2%. In addition, an evaluation sheet for the overall impact of factors on project performance is proposed. The result indicated that the level of impact is 70.7 per the scale of 100. Eventually, a comparison with other construction project types has been made to understand generally the factors of design changes in the construction industry.
 Keywords:
 design change; residential building; construction management; Vietnam.