Inherent Delay Risk Assessment in Construction: A proactive approach, mitigating the impact of causes of delay on schedule

Construction project delay leads to significant time & cost overrun and results in revenue loss. Construction projects' complexity and poor planning have negatively impacted the construction industry in adopting new technology, improving productivity, and environmental sustainability. Researcher in the construction profession has extensively studied construction delays in various circumstances. Available literature demonstrates that identifying critical causes of project delay, delay compensability, and project delay claims are broadly studied topics. Few researchers have investigated how to measure and mitigate construction project delay causes proactively before actual construction time. On the other hand, the lack of a standardized delay approach in assessing the impact of critical causes of delays on project performance and the heterogeneity of identified causes of delay have aggravated the situation to comprehend the delay cause impact on a project and its environment. To this end, this study has focused on identifying critical causes of delay in a standardized delay format to measure and mitigate its impact on a project before the actual construction start. This paper has employed a mix-method to quantify the impact of the inherent causes of delay on the project schedule. A five-step framework is applied to achieve the study objective. The proposed approach and technique enable researchers and practitioners to actively measure the impact of inherent delay causes on a project to improve productivity and eliminate redundant processes. This approach is more feasible to be integrated with new technology to assess alternative options for a project schedule to have a tolerable level of sequencing criticality and inherent delay risk.