Time overruns in the construction projects in Iraq: Case study on investigating and analyzing the root causes

2.1 A brief overview of Iraq construction industry

In the last few decades, Iraq has exposed into nationwide wars, causing a complete destruction in its economy and infrastructure, motivating Iraq government to pay more attention to the construction industry. Since 2008, Iraq witnessed a considerable growth in infrastructure construction and reconstruction projects. Iraq’s economy continued to grow as a result of the occurring growth in the oil sector where oil revenue contributes to the largest portion of revenue for the Iraqi government, resulting in booming all of urbanization and infrastructure development [6]. Then, the Iraqi government kept financing infrastructure projects till 2014 when big parts of Iraq were invaded by Islamic state of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), causing chaos in both economical and political situations of the country. So, ISIS was the first reason for slowing Iraq’s infrastructure. The other reason for infrastructure construction and reconstruction deceleration is the Iraqi government’s dependence mainly upon oil revenue for the country’s economy, therefore construction industry does not impact impressively on its economy [7]. Hence, coronavirus disease (COVID-19) and ISIS caused a decrease in oil revenue; that is why the Iraq government revealed an austerity policy and transferred large amounts of money predestined to finance infrastructure projects to cover medical and war expenses. These exceptionally developed situations created highly negative influences on the Iraq construction industry where many construction projects were suspended due to the shortage of funds [8]. After defeating ISIS, the Iraq government started again funding a number of infrastructure projects. As a consequence, the necessity of this study comes here to overwhelm the main delay causes of Iraq’s public projects and to stop wasting more time.

2.2 Previous studies regarding delay factors of construction projects

Many studies have defined different causes for delay of construction projects, which is reviewed and outlined in this section to constitute a theoretical framework where questionnaire items can be established. Danso et al. [9] investigated the influencing factors on time overruns in telecom tower projects in Ghana. They found that the main impacting factors for delay in telecom tower projects are delay of issuing payment certificates by clients, unrealistic requirements of clients, shortage of tower materials in markets, delay in providing design information and modifications of contract, inferior workmanship, inferior site management, contractor’s unethical behavior for gaining high profit, inflexible attitudes among the involved parties, construction engineers with inadequate experience, main dispute on project site, changes in design scope, shortage of quality control, poor managerial skills, and inferior management for the contract by consultants. Doloi et al. [10] executed a study for defining the key causes influencing time overruns in Indian construction projects. The most crucial factors of the Indian construction industry were defined as follows: a shortage of commitment, poor management of the site, inferior project site conditions, inefficient planning, clarity shortage in project scope, inadequate communication, and below-standard contracts. Gündüz et al. [11] explored causes of delays in construction projects in Turkey. They investigated the impact of 83 various delay causes in their study. The highly most influencing factors for delays were found as follows: inadequate experience of contractors, ineffective planning and scheduling of construction projects, inferior management for site and supervision, design changes, material late delivery, undependable subcontractors, late inspection and testing performance, poor skill workers, change orders, late site delivery, late approval of design documents, late payments, late decision making, inferior coordination and communication among the parties of projects, and unforeseen of surface and subsurface soil conditions. Marzouk et al. [12] investigated delay causes in Egyptian Civil Engineering projects. The specified top ten delay causes of projects are: not efficient planning and scheduling, inferior management of site and supervision, change orders, problems in projects financing by contractors, project awarding to the lowest bidder, low productivity of labors, impacts of subsurface conditions, late work delivery by subcontractors, lack of materials, and less-qualified workers. Khoshgoftar et al. [13] searched for causes of delays in construction projects in Iran. The key causes for delays defined in their study included: difficulties in financing the completed work, poor planning, management of site, management of contract, and shortage of communication between the project parties. Lindhard et al. [14] explored the causes of delays in the construction industry. In their conducted study, they revealed the six often most happening reasons to delay, which are connecting work, variation in the work plans, manpower, external conditions, construction design, and materials. Enshassi et al. [15] explored the most impacting factors on delays in construction projects in Gaza Strip. The revealed highly critical factors of delay in construction projects are as follows: strikes, closures of borders, materials shortage in markets and on sites, late delivery of materials to the construction sites, problems of cash flow, and inferior site management. Bajjou et al. [16] executed a study to specify the crucial factors of project delays in Moroccan construction study. The determined top ten factors causing for delays are late progress payments, employees with inadequate training, waste management without a strategy, unrealistic project duration set by clients, rework construction due to errors, extreme subcontracting, slowness in getting permits from governmental institutes, poor planning and scheduling, a shortage of collective planning, and workforce with no skills. Mahdi and Soliman [17] investigated the most significant causes of delay in all Arabic Gulf countries. The carried out analysis by them showed that there are 14 causes of delay in the gulf area, and the majority of delay factors comprises lack of resources, poor team management, inferior site management, unavailability of workforce and construction materials, difficulties in getting approvals from government institutions, and financial problems. Rachid et al. [18] searched the time overrun causes of construction projects in Algeria. They defined 59 delay causes in their study. The most important five causes of delay are slowness of change orders, unrealistic duration of the contract, slow variation orders of the additional quantities, slow progress payments, and inferior planning and scheduling. Mohamad et al. [19] investigated the time extension of projects in Malaysia. In their study, 16 causes of delay were defined. The most impacting causes are unavailability of skilled workers, a shortage of resources and manpower, change orders, drawing amendments, and slowness in making decisions. Indhu and Yogeswari [20] carried out a study to specify the inappropriate delay factors of construction equipment and their influence on the progress of construction projects in India. The main key factors that are defined in their study comprised incorrect management of inventory, equipment non-replacement, and unsound selection of equipment. These factors caused the firm to loss its reputation. As it is obvious from the previous review that factors causing the delay in different types of construction projects in the worldwide are available and discussed in numerous studies. A high percentage of the published studies have adopted the approach of questionnaire to get data from respondents. Anyhow, the substantial factors are extensively perceived to be the causes of construction projects delay. In addition, what was more observed is that there is a less coverage regarding time overrun factors in Iraq construction projects. Therefore, this study is intended to participate in this consideration by identifying the noticed knowledge gap.

4.1 Respondent demographic survey

The personal characteristics of 115 respondents who sent back valid questionnaires are included in Table 1.

4.2 Preliminary examination

It is a necessity to check if the study construct provides the analysis required standards before proceeding with the other developed study calculations. Thus, three checks are carried out for the study, which are: reliability, validity, and normality. To investigate the reliability of the questionnaire items, Cronbach’s alpha ( α ) is computed by applying formula (3) to check the internal consistency of the scales.

Cronbach’s alpha formula:

where k is the number of items of the conducted survey, ∑ s y 2 is the summation of the items’ variance, and s x 2 is the total score variance.

For the 45 items, Cronbach’s alpha was computed and found equals to 0.97, which is above the recommended threshold of 0.7 [29]. Also, acquiring Cronbach’s alpha of 0.97 means that excellent consistency is existing in the measurement. To make sure that the subject under examination is measured by the prepared questionnaire, a validity check is needed. This check is performed by conducting a review of the referring literature and through carrying out contents investigation by a number of clients, consultants, contractors, engineers, and project managers. The adjustments and comments of the target participants on the contents of the questionary survey assured the validity of the contents. The normality of the 45 items was investigated by performing Skewness and Kurtosis tests. Chan et al. [30] revealed that a distribution is normal when Skewness and Kurtosis values are zero; hence, the obtained Skewness and Kurtosis values are testified against the null hypothesis of zero. The values of z were within the range of − 3.29 to + 3.29 . Thus, they are found to be rationally normally distributed. Values of Skewness and Kurtosis tests are included in Table 2. Abbreviations of variables are provided in Table 3.

4.3 Ranking of public project delay causes

The provided respondents’ rankings on the delay causes of Iraq public construction projects are assessed in this section. The participants ranked the 45 delay causes of the questionnaire of construction projects by using a five-point Likert Scale. The utilized process is aimed at specifying the relative importance of various factors identified as being the major reasons for the delay in construction projects. The RII is computed by applying formula (4) [31,32]:

where RII is the relative importance index, P i is the respondents rating of delay factors of public construction projects, U i is the frequency of respondents choosing similar ranking of delay factors, N is the size of the sample, and n is the highest obtainable score on the delay factors of projects. The SPSS analysis findings, rankings of all categories of respondents, and the overall respondents’ rankings are comprised in Table 4.

As it is clear from Tables 2 and 4, the target participants ranked “global and local economic crisis” with a mean value of 3.70 as the most critical cause for delay in construction projects in Iraq. This is followed by “Bureaucracy and Corruption” with a mean value of 3.68 as the second highly severe delay cause, while “public holidays” with a mean of 3.57 was ranked third. The top ten rankings for time overrun causes according to the order of importance are as follows.

Global and local economic crises, Bureaucracy and corruption, public holidays, delays in getting permits from municipality, issuing many change orders by clients, rework due to errors during construction, type of project biding and award (the lowest bidder), frequent changes for subcontractors due to their incompetent work, changing in the project design, and difficulties in projects financing by contractors.

Moreover, the computed indexes are ranked for all target respondent categories. The main purpose of investigating all respondent rankings is to identify the highly crucial delay causes from various perspectives according to the respondent categories. Thus, as it is included in Table 4, clients ranked “bureaucracy and corruption” as the most severe time overrun cause, followed by “slowness in making decisions” (ranked second), while “poor communication and coordination between clients and other parties” and “delays in getting permits from municipality” are ranked third. Consultants ranked “type of project bidding and award (the lowest bidder)” as the highest delay cause, succeeded by “difficulties in projects financing by contractors” and “Frequent changes for subcontractors due to their incompetent work” ranked second, while “slowness in making decisions” and “bureaucracy and corruption” were ranked third. PMs ranked first all of “global and local economic disaster” and “bureaucracy and corruption,” ranked second “public holidays,” and ranked third all of “difficulties in projects financing by contractors” and “frequent changes for subcontractors due to their incompetent work.” Contractors ranked “bureaucracy and corruption” as the most critical delay cause, ranked “global and local economic disaster” as the top second crucial delay cause, and “public holidays” was ranked third. Engineers ranked “global and local economic disaster” as the most severe delay cause, followed by “rework due to errors during construction” (ranked to No. 2), while “public holidays” was ranked third.

4.4 Agreement analysis

To confirm that the provided rankings by all involved respondents’ categories: clients, consultants, project managers, contractors, and engineers are not ordered by coincidence or partiality, but these rankings represent the real and true causes of delay in construction projects in Iraq. For that purpose, two methods are carried out: Spearman rank correlation coefficient and Kendall’s coefficient of concordance.

Spearman rank correlation coefficient can be computed by applying the following equation [33]:

where d represents the difference between the rankings of any two respondent categories for an individual delay factor, and n stands for the number of delay factors, which is 45 for this study. The computation outputs of the Spearman rank correlation coefficient are included in Table 5.

From the contents of Table 5, it is obvious that the calculated coefficients are strong and positive, which show a high harmonization between all respondent categories’ ranks. The highest harmonization pairs are “consultant-PM,” “client-PM,” and “client-consultant.” In case there is a necessity to constitute a level of agreement between the categories of respondents by adopting a single coefficient, then the significance of the second check of Kendall’s coefficient of concordance (W) comes out. Legendre [34] stated that Kendall’s coefficient is directly related to the Spearman rank correlation coefficient. Kendall’s coefficient can be calculated by computing the mean of Spearman correlations pairwise by carrying out the following equation [35]:

where m is the number of categories of respondents, and P represents the mean of Spearman correlations pairwise, which equals 0.754 for this study.

The computation of Kendall’s coefficient is 0.803; that means there is a harmonization in a high degree among the categories of all respondents on the time overruns causes of construction projects in Iraq.

4.5 Significance test

The Chi-squared test is put to use to mark the agreement or disagreement context among the respondent categories rankings is considerable statistically. Two hypotheses are put for the X 2 test, which are null hypothesis that means no agreement among the rankings of the respondent categories existed; hence, an alternate hypothesis that indicates an agreement among the respondent categories’ rankings is established [27]. A relationship is found between Kendall’s coefficient and Chi-squared value as explained in the following formula [36]:

where n = the number of delay factors, which equals 45, m is the number of categories of respondents, which equals 5, and W = Kendall’s coefficient, which is 0.803 for this study.

The calculation output of Chi-squared test is 176.66. Then, by using the critical table for n = 45 , 95% confidence interval, significance level ( α = 0.05 ) , the X 2 critical ratio equals X α 2 ( n − 1 ) = X 0.05 44 = 60.48 [27]. Since, the calculated X 2 = 176.66 is more than X critical 2 = 60.48 , the null hypothesis ( H 0 ) is rejected, and an agreement of a high degree among the five categories of respondents on the 45 delay causes existed.

4.6 Classification of delay factors

Factor analysis has been put to use to examine the relations among the 45 delay factors used for this study. The used extraction method for this analysis is principal component analysis to group causes of delay in Iraq construction projects into less number of groups. Before conducting factor analysis, a preparative check was performed by utilizing Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin (KMO) and Bartlett’s tests to investigate the suitability of the gathered data for factor analysis. The main advantage of using Bartlett’s test is to ensure the correlation matrix identity while the KMO test measures the sample adequacy where the data significance value should not be less than 0.5 to be satisfactory for factor analysis [37]. The findings of Bartlett and KMO tests are comprised in Table 6. The outputs of the performed tests included in Table 6 show that the adequacy of KMO measure of sampling is 0.917, which is above 0.5, assuring the appropriateness of data for factor analysis. Moreover, a significance value of 0.000, which is below 0.5 where it indicates the excellence of the measure and confirms the identity of the correlation matrix [38]. An eight-component model was extracted from 45 items of time overruns in construction projects in Iraq for a sample of 115 respondents. The extracted components comprise 73.647% of the responses’ variance. Results of the total variance for the delay factors of construction projects are included in Table 7. The component transformation matrix for the eight extracted components is comprised in Table 8. As it is obvious from Table 8 that most of the correlation coefficients are above the recommended level of 0.3 [39]. Furthermore, a rotated component matrix is included in Table 9 where all contained loading factors are more than 0.4.

The extracted time overrun factors are illustrated as follows: Factor 1: Inaccuracy of tendering process: This factor comprises failures occurring because of client’s team deficiency in preparing an accurate tender estimation due to unskilled estimation team, not detailed project’s drawings and specifications, unavailability of historical cost data, imports, etc. Factor 2: Technical performance management: This factor includes failures happening because of contractor deficiency the management of technical performance where he is not able to provide construction fleet of equipment on time with the needed number, horsepower, and productivity. Factor 3: Government interferences: It is composed of three sequent items, which are: government changes, political interferences, and changes in the regulations and laws as a result. In other words, government changes lead to political interferences in the projects and to changes in government policies. Factor 4: Weather conditions: This factor comprises all risk consequences from severe weather conditions that occur at projects’ sites. Since, construction relies on weather conditions, planning and designing projects in Iraq are highly specified by the geography, landscape, and local weather conditions. Besides, building materials and strategies are changeable to fit a particular climate. Factor 5: Rework construction practices: It includes changes, errors, and/or omissions happening during construction stage and resulting in time overruns. The most encountered rework causes in Iraq projects are construction method changes, errors, and omissions that occurred during the construction stage. Factor 6: Material delays: This factor is composed of two items: numerous type availability of materials in markets and difficulty of getting governmental approvals. The Iraqi market comprises various types of materials from different sources, and getting an approval about usage of a specific material is very hard because of the outdated traditional governmental policies. Factor 7: Estimation challenges: It concludes the issues of risk management that could be ignored in the Iraq public project management. Risk challenges include poor processes of estimation due to unskilled estimators and incomplete drawings provided by clients. Factor 8: Exceptional challenges: Due to terrorist threats in Iraq, there are restrictions on delivering materials, equipment, and workers into some governmental sites where projects are constructed. Therefore, governmental permits are needed to deliver contractor supplies, but obtaining permits is complicated because of the impractical governmental regulations.