Project Schedule Delay in Infrastructure Construction in North Vietnam: A Case Study of Noi Bai-Laocai Highway Project-Package A3

Recently, delays occur commonly in almost all projects in Vietnam. So they become a big problem mostly for every project where good or suitable solutions are not always used. In the project implementing phase, anticipating the factors causing delays is one of the important scopes of project manager. Therefore, project managers need to understand and analyze the causes of delays before giving reasonable solutions prior to construction commencement. Normally, the prominent characteristic difference between infrastructure project and office building project is that road or highway connects many locations together so that it needs a lot of time to discuss, communicate and negotiate with local residents living inside or along the project, while this issue is not existing in the office building project. However, in Vietnam, for infrastructure construction project, the owner doesn’t pay enough time and cost for detailed investigations or land acquisition for good planning in schedule and budget prior to performance, but the project implemention and land acquisition are doing at the same time popularly. Consequently, land acquisition caused delay in this performing time very prominently.

Besides, there are also many other factors causing delays in this kind of project such as design changes, price fluctuation, delay in sub-construction work, etc. These factors are necessary to address to find out the reasons and solution for each case. Finally, all are needed for all involved parties to learn the lessons for their success in the future. 

Mr. Tran Le Minh Triet made a case study to find out the major events causing the delay and consequential effects at construction stage. These events were analyzed in different prospect of the owner, contractor, designer and consultant. Then, recommendations of mitigation of delays are proposed for future construction projects. For this reason, this study aimed to:

1. find out some delay factors in an infrastructure project and to analyze the relationship of these factors

2.  give suggestion for prevention from delays, by the way to extract the lessons for experience.

 Conclusion

 In this project, most of delays are from the client, the contractor, the project (slow interim payment from the project), the engineer (delay in a new material approval by the engineer) and the external, but they are almost within the control of the client, the contractor and one factor is from external (price fluctuation) out of control of anyone. However, due to the infrastructure construction site spreads in long and wide areas, some reasons such as land acquisition; design changes; differing site conditions are prominent and typical more than in the building construction also contributed to the delays.

For the client, the reason such as slow decision making process is also difficult to improve in the developing country like Vietnam. Besides, for the contractor, other reasons such as poor site management and supervision; delay in sub-contraction work; inadequate experience of the main contractor and delay in a new material approved by the engineer are usually happened to both inexperienced and experienced contractors. Also, many delays will arise many claims later. Finally, recommendations common to the above mentioned are both general and from experience. Hopefully, these can used in consideration with the real conditions in order to make it more real in similar projects. To avoid or/and mitigate delay, working plan is prepared carefully for inevitable project setbacks and good collaborative project management will facilitate and ensure minimal project delays.

His thesis abstract is copied below.

Abstract

In construction industry, a successful project normally meets 3 basic requirements. It meets time requirements within the budget, required quality specifications and safety requirements in the operation. Unfortunately, the highway Noi Bai-Lao Cai project-package A3 under construction has the progress behind schedule in the terms of project performance due to some problems in project management where there are many causes leading to partial delays and overall project delay. Lessons learnt from these problems have become essential for successful project managers. Generally, the problems involved with project delays are solvable. To know how for solving problems, the critical factors impacting negatively on the phase of project performance need to be discovered and identified for analysis.

This report will present the basic types of delays and analyze ten reasons causing the delay problems in the highway Noi Bai-Lao Cai project-package A3 in the North Viet Nam. The method applied to analyze the delays based on the 4 ways to categorize delays of Theodore J. Trauner, Jr., PE, PP (Construction delays, 1990) to conduct the objective of the study.

Finally, some suggestions dealing with project delay problems and lessons learnt in the project executing stage are proposed.