Analogy-based ranking of delay causes: an outlook for future projects

Business competition has intensified in many world countries. With such increasingly competitive environment, companies -including those operating in the construction industry- need to seek opportunities outside their home market. Recent construction industry statistics show this trend to be on the rise, despite the increased level of uncertainty that comes along. With an aim to help Egyptian contractors expand their business, the paper presents a study on predicting the causes of schedule delay in potential out-ofcountry projects, especially in politically unstable and/or economically underdeveloped countries. Novelty of the research comes from developing a 'ranked' project-specific list of schedule delay causes for any 'future' project into consideration. Development of such list depends on partial analogies with past project cases, whether completed by the company or others working in the industry. For a new project in a given country/region, the list conveys the potentially significant causes of delay specific to the project under study, while taking into account the dominant country and project conditions. The paper provides an overview of the research methodology and study implementation. The research utilises a global list of schedule delay causes, created after scanning a large pool of completed projects in Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East. A process is then devised to handle both quantitative and qualitative data sources. The qualitative approach is adopted in case of incomplete, inaccessible, or unreliable past project records. In the latter case, knowledge of the experts who participated in these projects was used. Finally, means to merge the outcomes of both quantitative and qualitative analyses were sought. The paper also details the indexing system used for identifying the partial analogies between the new project and those past experiences contained in either the qualitative or the quantitative data sets.