A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF DELAYS FACTORS IN PROJECT COMPLETION IN LIBYA AND UK CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY

Delays in completing construction projects have significant financial and social impact to all parties involved in the construction process and in particular in developing countries. This is very evident in most construction projects in Libya and in both public and private sectors. The research study was initiated by Libyan Government and the main aim of the project is to develop a new strategy in reducing the impact of delay factors. In order to achieve this, a number of objectives have been set-to conduct a comprehensive literature survey, to conduct a comparative study of the delay factors in project completion in both Libya and UK using semi structured questionnaire and finally, to identify and analyse the causes of delay and ranked them using frequency of occurrence and severity. The critical causes of delay for construction projects were quite different between Libya and UK. For the former, the most critical causes of delay in Libyan construction industry were low skills of manpower, changes in the scope of the project, slowness in giving instruction and poor qualification of consultant, while for the latter they were financial problems, bad weather conditions on the job site and change in the scope of project. Statistical experiments including Paired Samples T-Test, was run to test the significance of the survey data in both countries Libya and UK. The statistical results confirmed the collected data from the survey were significant.