Barriers for Effective Implementation of Construction Schedule in Infrastructure Projects

Abstract

Schedule management and delays is one of the most crucial issue but the lack of knowledge, understanding and awareness regarding the barriers that contribute to the project delays and failure for not implementing the effective construction schedule is unclear. Construction scheduling have several benefits for enhancing timely completion of project but various barriers may affect the schedule, there is a significant gap between its theoretical importance and practical implementation in actual construction. Therefore this study aims to identify these barriers for effective implementation of construction schedule in infrastructure project through literature review and assess the relative importance of these barriers from main construction stakeholders’ perspectives. First, an initial list of 45 barriers collected from the previous literature was reduced to 20 barriers using the content analysis and Delphi method. Then, an online and field questionnaire survey was performed across the Pakistan construction industry to observe and analyze the data through exploratory factor analysis and relative importance index of 20 barriers from 200 valid responses. After statistical analysis, the top five critical barriers for the schedule implementation of infrastructure projects in Pakistan are identified such as unrealistic project schedules imposed in contract from client, poor planning and scheduling, contractor financial problems, lack of proper training and experience of project manager and inadequate project scheduling software’s. In order to check the findings of this research, a comparison of the barriers with 13 other countries, revealed that the top five critical barriers was not only the most common barriers in Pakistan construction industry, but also indicated up in various other nations as well. These findings can be useful for main construction stakeholders to reduce schedule delays.