Critical Success Factors for Preventing Delays in Post Disaster Reconstruction (PDR) Projects in Pakistan

Abstract

Post-disaster reconstruction projects are considered complex projects in nature and are difficult to manage because these projects are different from routine construction projects. Natural disasters frequently occur in Pakistan and destroy infrastructure facilities, homes, workplaces, health and educational facilities that expose affected people to vulnerable conditions. One of the most important challenges for the government agencies and organizations involved in the rehabilitation processes is to reconstruct the public infrastructural facilities as soon as possible. To ensure successful delivery of projects in post-disaster situations, the identification of critical success and delay factors and understanding their relationship is essential. Therefore, this research aims to identify the critical success and delay factors and their relationship to improve the performance of organizations involved in post-disaster reconstruction projects in the future. This study extracted forty success factors and sixteen delay factors from the literature. A preliminary survey was conducted, in which participants were requested to rank the success and delay factors based on importance and their real-time existence in the context of Pakistan. Finally, seven success and delay factors were selected for further study based on their overall relative importance index and then correlation was examined to determine which success factors were the most influential in preventing project delays in the perceptions of clients, consultants, and contractors. Data were analyzed using statistical methods to measure the strength and direction of the correlation between critical success and delay factors, and to evaluate the influence of critical success factors on delay factors. Additionally, the influence of critical success factors on delay factors was analyzed using two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) to examine how respondents evaluated the influence of success factors in preventing delay factors individually and collectively and which success factors were perceived as most influential in avoiding or preventing delay factors. The research found that the client's competent directors and team members with appropriate qualifications and skill level were the most influential success factors in preventing most of the delay factors, whereas performance assessment and monitoring of ongoing projects was the least influential among the seven success factor