Systematic Processing Framework for Identifying, Assessing and Overcoming Delays in Construction Projects in India

For nations and organisations, infrastructure development is considered to be one of the most advantageous activities in renovation and rejuvenation of the society for bringing strategic objectives and goals from merely written plans to reality. Although delays in construction industry has been the focus of extensive investigation over a few decades now, few academics made an attempt to investigate how delays affect both public and private building projects in many countries around the world, particularly in developing and financially struggling nations. The purpose of this work is to close a critical knowledge gap in this area by identifying, assessing and overcoming the major causative factors of delays in construction projects in Nashik, India. The main objective of the study is to develop and construct a systematic processing framework in the form of flowchart for the study area. The procedure for gathering data for the study is carried out by questionnaire survey involving 250 construction industry professionals based on simple random sampling, with 48 critical delay factors that are divided into seven main categories. Relative importance index (RII) analysis was used to rank the respondents’ feedback. Using IBM SPSS Statistics, the data's internal consistency and reliability, or Cronbach's alpha, were examined (Version 28) and it was found out to be 0.74. Results showed that disputes in labour and labour strikes (RII = 0.855), poor material management (RII = 0.851) and contractor's incompatibility with new technology (RII = 0.845) were listed as the top three reasons for construction project delays in Nashik, India. The top most factors influencing delay were shown in simplified manner with Ishikawa diagram. The systematic processing framework was developed to overcome the problem on hand. The municipal corporation of Nashik, in order to become successful and efficient, construction employees need to be trained in the necessary technical skills, which requires significant investment from higher education institutions as well as other stakeholders. This study paves the pathway for the future developments of construction management models to use in residential and infrastructure projects in Nashik as well as in Indian construction industry.