EFFECTS OF INCOMPLETE DESIGN ON COST AND TIME PERFORMANCE OF ROAD PROJECTS IN KWARA STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

In an ideal world, the designs and documentation provided for construction projects should be complete, precise and unambiguous. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case on road projects procured by public organization in Kwara State and quite often contractors are supplied with project documentation that were incomplete, conflicting or erroneous, thereby making achievement of value for money by clients of public road projects in term of time, cost, quality, quantities, safety performance and other objectives on road projects in our society to be unpredictable. This adversely leads to reduction in the contractors profit, increases contractors project overhead, affect consultants reputation, lead to wide disparity between initial cost estimate/time and final cost estimate/time after completion with liability incurred by the clients. These effects resulted to claims by the contractors for additional cost and time ,which causes dispute between the client representatives and contractors, which subsequently lead to claims from contractors for extension of time and additional compensation for costly cost of rework, new designs and designs revision, request for information, instruction and clarification. When owner have tight budget or are reluctant to pay more for these claims on road projects, a dispute arise, the dispute lead to further increase cost in an attempt to resolve the issues through abortive arbitration or litigation , which frequently lead to the abandonment of road projects. As a result of this, all stakeholder expected revenue is loss or reduced; increase the cost of capital borrowed by the clients and contractors; depreciating in value of the road project, contractor tools and equipment as a result of project abandonment; pilfering of materials stored on site ; reduce the reputation of the involved consultants etc. It is against this background that effects of incomplete design on cost and time performance on road projects delivery were proposed as a research to identify the factors responsible for incomplete design, its effects on cost and time performance of road projects. Non random sampling technique was adopted while the population of professionals was obtained through their various professional bodies. Due to large population (1128) of the respondents sample size was determined from the entire population using the equation 1 (Yemane, 1997) to arrive at sample size of 249. Out of 249 questionnaires administered 185 retrieved was considered suitable for the analysis. Descriptive method was used in presenting the data, Relative Importance Index and Percentage were used in analysed data collected from respondents through questionnaires. Result of the conducted analysed data showed the highly rated factor responsible for incomplete design to be designers combining the role of designing, costing and supervision while the major effects of incomplete design on cost and time performance on road projects encourage corruption practices among the involved stakeholders and schedule overrun respectively. The maximum cost and time variance was evaluated to be 41.73% and 28.11% while the minimum cost and time variance was evaluated to be 13.41% and 6.27% respectively. The section of the road projects majorly affected is the road pavements. As obtained from the discussion of the finding, it is therefore recommended that the existing procurement act should be review by the Governments to limit the jurisdictions of engineers on road construction to designing and supervision only and all relevant professionals should be involved during the designing and construction of road projects especially Land surveyors, Geotechnical engineers and Quantity surveyors.