Investigation of Root Causes of Delays and the Data Usage Trends in the Indian Construction Sector

Abstract

Construction projects often deviate from their planned schedule and have poor records about the updates on the project’s progress. Access to project data is a crucial aspect that seeks attention to make data-driven decisions to reduce delays. Therefore, this research aims to investigate the causes of delays and the available data usage, specifically during the execution phase of a building construction project. The factors causing cost and time overruns and the less use of Electronic Data Management Systems (EDMS) were identified from the past literature. A questionnaire survey was conducted with 100 Indian professionals to assess the impact of the shortlisted factors and the data usage trends in the Indian context. Henry Garret's method was used to rank the factors. The experts were interviewed to investigate the root causes of the delays and identify the triggering events that cause the same. The survey findings indicated the change in scope of work, continuous revisions in the drawings, and delay in approval from higher authorities as the top three reasons. 88.8% of the respondents from the survey were affirmative that real-time monitoring of a project would help them to address the delay issues. This research presents a unique attempt to identify the delay causes specifically during the project’s execution phase, along with outlining the data usage trends in the Indian context. The work can be extended to developing a real-time monitoring framework to optimally utilize the data of a project’s execution phase.