Investigating Main Causes for Schedule Delay in Construction Projects in Bangladesh

Delay is the most common problem in the construction industry. It has many negative effects on project's success in terms of time, cost, quality, and safety. From the literature review, a total of thirty-five factors of delay were selected. These factors were divided into seven groups related to materials, manpower, owner, consultant, contractor, construction, and external problems. This study was carried out to identify the main causes of delay for a construction project through their importance level. The importance level was determined based on the frequency of occurrence and severity of impact. The structured questionnaire has distributed to the respondents who have much experience in construction management in Bangladesh. The results of analysis indicated that top five factors of construction delay according to their level of importance are: (1) price of construction materials increased very rapidly, (2) political situation (revolution/ public strikes), (3) shortages of skilled workers, (4) poor site management and supervision by contractor, (5) incompetent/ immature subcontractors. These findings of this study are expected to be significant contributions to Bangladesh construction industry in controlling current performance of project on time overrun.