Exploring the Building Construction Projects Failure in Pakistan A Life Cycle Perspective

Abstract

The construction industry plays an important role in promoting business, economic development and prosperity by creating jobs and generating large scale economic activity. Trend in multistory building construction is likely to increase in Pakistan due to the government’s focus on vertical construction. Thus, in order to ensure successful economic activity, it is important to ensure that the projects are delivered successfully and that they do not fail. It is well known that project failures are not caused by single independent underlying factors rather these failures entail series of actions or events with complex interrelationships and origins in various phases of a project’s lifecycle. This research aims to investigate the so-called failure drivers that can and do contribute to failure of multistory building construction projects. The research further aims to develop the associated failure mechanisms which will enable the concerned stakeholders to understand how failure drivers propagate to advance stages of failure, through a project’s lifecycle, before eventually leading to a project’s failure. To achieve the research aim, it was necessary to establish the failure criteria. Therefore, from the extant literature review, the failure criteria were established. In order to identify the failure driver, the real case studies were identified and the semi-structured interview were conducted to identify the failure drivers and their relationship. The overall 25 case studies were identified and out of this, 18 case studies were identified in the after failure criteria and seven case studies were identified in the before failure criteria. The 40 failure drivers were identified during the data collection and these were used to develop the failure mechanism by using the path diagram which is a cause and effect tool. The slow progress, drawing changes, inadequate preliminary study of project, delay in decision process, unclear scope description, scope changes, incompetent project team, rework were found the most frequently occurring failure drivers. After the development of the failure mechanisms, it was discovered that the client initiated 32 failure mechanisms while six were initiated by contractor. These all failure mechanism were then integrated to further broaden the failure scenario. The primary failure driver ‘inadequate preliminary study of project’ is found most critical as nine failure mechanisms initiated by this. After integrating the failure mechanism, it was revealed that planning and design phase and construction phase are critical. The 20 failure mechanisms were initiated in the planning and design phase. In the end, the remedies were suggested to all the primary failure drivers and also the primary failure drivers were integrated with Project viii Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) project management process group and knowledge area framework. After integrating, which knowledge area need more concentration of all stakeholders is the procurement management. The result of this study will help stakeholders to visualize the root causes of the failure drivers. It will also help the clients to understand their expanding role in the construction by taking responsibilities of the architectural and structural design and supplying co