The root causes of construction project failure

Abstract

Construction projects play an important role in the economic development of every country. Nevertheless, review of projects' documents indicates that, in most cases, the projects are not finished on assigned budget as scheduled, such that they sometimes loss their economic justification and simply fail. Consequently, devising suitable solutions is essential to the prevention of such failures. This is impossible without identifying the foremost causes of failure. In this study, first, all factors of failure are identified using Fault Tree Analysis (FTA). FTA as a diagnostic tool allows us to efficiently isolate root causes of failure. To rank these factors, dedicated specialists are requested to assess the risk of each cause using linguistic terms; thereby, relevant calculations are carried out using the Linguistic Weighted Average (LWA). Undeniably, considering the complexity of construction projects and incomplete expert knowledge, judgments must not be made using crisp value conception. Hence, fuzzy theory is utilized to achieve more accurate results. Results indicate that the majority of problems in projects stem from financial concerns and shortcomings of bidding process. In the last section, an actual case study is used to validate our results.