Establishment of Dispute Avoidance Maturity Assessment Model for Construction Project Stakeholders

Abstract

Construction industry plays very decisive role in enhancing economic growth of a country. As the famous quote says it all, “when the construction industry prospers, everything prospers”. Construction industry being very much dynamic involves multiple stakeholders for delivering construction projects and the diverged range of stakeholders possess contrast perceptions, which sets perfect recipe for conflict. Conflicts if not managed well propagates into disputes which hinders the successful completion of project significantly whose resolution usually ends up in litigation and leaves the parties in harsh relationship. Despite the extensive literature on disputes no integrated mechanism has been introduced to incorporate the behavioral aspect of primary stakeholders and explore the CSFs for dispute avoidance. So this study in reference to introduce a dispute avoidance framework, incorporates behavioral aspect of primary stakeholders CSFs for dispute avoidance and fetches a Dispute avoidance maturity assessment model from it. The research is divided into four basic stages (initial research, focused research, further research and advanced research). In first stage preliminary literature review was carried out to explore the main research area and followed by discussions with supervisor research gap was identified. Later on, an extensive insight was performed via detailed literature review and factors deemed to avoid disputes were extracted, tailed by detailed formal discussions and expert reviews. A detailed methodology to bring off the planned research in order to achieve our desired objectives thoroughly was decided and Fuzzy Set Theory (FST) was chosen to be incorporated as our research approach. The phase of further research comprised of questionnaire surveys for data collection. Two rounds survey solicited level of importance from 91 and level of implementation from 50 respondents. Lastly, statistical analyses screened the most critical factors known as CSFs which were subjected to FST and Fuzzy Dispute Avoidance Maturity Assessment Model (FDAMAM) was established which assessed the maturity of 21 CSFs, maturity of contractor, client and consultants involved and overall maturity of the industry. Furthermore this model presented the individual maturities and growth potentials of each CSF on the basis of which they are divided into four quadrants. The respective maturities of consultant, client and contractors were further explored through semi-structured interviews in case studies and summing up the overall efforts of this research ‘An integrated strategy to effectively implement the dispute avoidance framework’ was devised as a prime contribution to the practical aspect of CI.