Analysis of the Complex Mechanisms of Defect Generation in Construction Projects
Publication: Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
Volume 142, Issue 2
Abstract
There have been numerous research efforts to minimize construction defects and a variety of suggestions have been provided. However, while all of these suggestions are valuable and have the potential to prevent defects, a construction company may have difficulty adopting them due to financial and practical constraints. Thus, this calls for the identification and characterization of the most influential causes of defects, in order to prioritize defect prevention strategies. To address this necessity, this paper aims to identify the most important causes of defects in terms of frequency, magnitude, and pathogenicity. For this goal, a questionnaire survey of 106 industry professionals was conducted to examine 30 causes of defects, collected through an extensive literature review. High frequency and high magnitude causes were identified and traced back to their initiating causes. Accordingly, the five most pathogenic causes were found to be (1) organizational culture, (2) time pressure and constraints, (3) workplace quality system, (4) financial constraints on operational expenses, and (5) inadequate employee training or learning opportunities. This paper is valuable to researchers in terms of developing a theoretical foundation to analyze and visualize the complex mechanisms of defect generation in construction. Further, this paper is of value to practitioners in terms of providing an effective tool to set defect prevention strategies and prioritize investment areas for quality improvements.
Get full access to this article
View all available purchase options and get full access to this article.
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning (2013010660).
References
Aibinu, A. A., and Odeyinka, H. A. (2006). “Construction delays and their causative factors in Nigeria.” J. Constr. Eng. Manage., 667–677.
Aljassmi, H., and Han, S. (2012). “Classification and occurrence of defective acts in residential construction projects.” J. Civ. Eng. Manage., 20(2), 175–185.
Aljassmi, H., and Han, S. (2013). “Analysis of causes of construction defects using fault trees and risk importance measures.” J. Constr. Eng. Manage., 870–880.
Aljassmi, H., Han, S., and Davis, S. (2014). “Project pathogens network: A new approach to analyzing the generation mechanisms of construction defects.” J. Constr. Eng. Manage., 04013028.
Alreck, P. L., and Settle, R. B. (1985). The survey research handbook, Irwin, Homewood, IL.
Andi, and Minato, T. (2004). “Representing causal mechanism of defective designs: Exploration through case studies.” Constr. Manage. Econ., 22(2), 183–192.
Arditi, D., Akan, G. T., and Gurdamar, S. (1985). “Reasons for delays in public projects in Turkey.” Constr. Manage. Econ., 3(2), 171–181.
Arditi, D., Elhassan, A., and Toklu, Y. C. (2002). “Constructability analysis in the design firm.” J. Constr. Eng. Manage., 117–126.
Atkinson, A. R. (2002). “The pathology of building defects; a human error approach.” Eng. Constr. Archit. Manage., 9(1), 53–61.
Aven, T., and Nøkland, T. E. (2010). “On the use of uncertainty importance measures in reliability and risk analysis.” Reliab. Eng. Syst. Saf., 95(2), 127–133.
Ballard, G., and Howell, G. (1998). “Shielding production: Essential step in production control.” J. Constr. Eng. Manage., 11–17.
Barber, P., Graves, A., Hall, M., Sheath, D., and Tomkins, C. (2000). “Quality failure costs in civil engineering projects.” Int. J. Qual. Reliab. Manage., 17(4), 479–492.
Birnbaum, L. W. (1969). On the importance of different elements in a multi-element system, Academic Press, New York.
Borgatti, S. P., Everett, M. G., and Freeman, L. C. (2002). Ucinet for Windows: Software for social network analysis, Analytic Technologies, Cambridge.
Braarud, P. Ø. (2001). “Subjective task complexity and subjective workload: Criterion validity for complex team tasks.” Int. J. Cognit. Ergon., 5(3), 261–273.
BRE (Building Research Establishment). (1982). “Quality in traditional housing—An investigation into faults and their avoidance.” Garston, Watford, U.K.
Burati, J. L., Jr., Farrington, J. J., and Ledbetter, W. B. (1992). “Causes of quality deviations in design and construction.” J. Constr. Eng. Manage., 34–49.
Busby, J. S. (2001). “Error and distributed cognition in design.” Des. Stud., 22(3), 233–254.
Busby, J. S., and Hughes, E. J. (2004). “Projects, pathogens and incubation periods.” Int. J. Project Manage., 22(5), 425–434.
Deming, W. E. (2000). Out of the crisis, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
El-Rayes, K., and Kandil, A. (2005). “Time-cost-quality trade-off analysis for highway construction.” J. Constr. Eng. Manage., 477–486.
Fayek, A. R., Dissanayake, M., and Campero, O. (2004). “Developing a standard methodology for measuring and classifying construction field rework.” Can. J. Civ. Eng., 31(6), 1077–1089.
Fussell, J. B., and Vesely, W. E. (1972). “A new methodology for obtaining cut sets for fault tress.” Trans. Am. Nuclear Soc., 15, 262–263.
Hardie, N., and Walsh, P. (1994). “Towards a better understanding of quality.” Int. J. Qual. Reliab. Manage., 11(4), 53–63.
Harvey, L., and Green, D. (1993). “Defining quality.” Assess. Eval. Higher Educ., 18(1), 9–34.
Hellard, R. B. (1991). Total quality management in construction practice, in practice management: New perspectives for the construction professional, E & F Spon, London.
Hwang, B. G., Thomas, S. R., Haas, C. T., and Caldas, C. H. (2009). “Measuring the impact of rework on construction cost performance.” J. Constr. Eng. Manage., 187–198.
Jacko, J. A., and Ward, K. G. (1996). “Toward establishing a link between psychomotor task complexity and human information processing.” Comput. Ind. Eng., 31(1), 533–536.
Josephson, P. E., and Hammarlund, Y. (1999). “The causes of costs of defects in construction: A study of seven building projects.” Autom. Constr., 8(6), 681–687.
Lee, S., Peña-Mora, F., and Park, M. (2005). “Quality and change management model for large scale concurrent design and construction projects.” J. Constr. Eng. Manage., 890–902.
Lopez, R., Love, P. E., Edwards, D. J., and Davis, P. R. (2010). “Design error classification, causation, and prevention in construction engineering.” J. Perform. Constr. Facil., 399–408.
Love, P. E., and Edwards, D. J. (2004). “Forensic project management: The underlying causes of rework in construction projects.” Civ. Eng. Environ. Syst., 21(3), 207–228.
Love, P. E., Edwards, D. J., and Irani, Z. (2009). “Work stress, support, and mental health in construction.” J. Constr. Eng. Manage., 650–658.
Love, P. E., Edwards, D. J., Irani, Z., and Walker, D. H. T. (2009). “Project pathogens: The anatomy of omission errors in construction and resource engineering projects.” IEEE Trans. Eng. Manage., 56(3), 425–435.
Love, P. E., Lopez, R., and Kim, J. T. (2013). “Design error management: Interaction of people, organisation and the project environment in construction.” Struct. Infrastruct. Eng., 10(6), 1–10.
Love, P. E., and Smith, J. (2003). “Benchmarking, benchaction, and benchlearning: Rework mitigation in projects.” J. Manage. Eng., 147–159.
Manavazhi, M. R., and Xunzhi, Z. (2001). “Productivity oriented analysis of design revisions.” Constr. Manage. Econ., 19(4), 379–391.
McAdam, R., Mason, B., and McCrory, J. (2007). “Exploring the dichotomies within the tacit knowledge literature: Towards a process of tacit knowing in organizations.” J. Knowl. Manage., 11(2), 43–59.
Nepal, M. P., Park, M., and Son, B. (2006). “Effects of schedule pressure on construction performance.” J. Constr. Eng. Manage., 182–188.
Ogbonna, E., and Harris, L. C. (1998). “Managing organizational culture: Compliance or genuine change?” Br. J. Manage., 9(4), 273–288.
Oppenheim, A. N. (1992). Questionnaire design, interviewing, and attitude measurement, Pinter, London.
Pearl, J. (2000). Causality: Models, reasoning, and inference, Cambridge University Press, New York.
Reason, J. T. (1990). Human error, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Reason, J. T. (1995). “Understanding adverse events: Human factors.” Qual. Health Care, 4(2), 80–89.
Reason, J. T. (2002). “Combating omission errors through task analysis and good reminders.” Qual. Saf. Health Care, 11(1), 40–44.
Schein, E. H. (1985). Organisational culture and leadership: A dynamic view, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.
Silva, L. P., Ruwanpura, J. Y., and Hewage, K. N. (2009). “Virtual super-vision in construction projects.” Proc., ASCE Construction Research Congress 2009, ASCE, Reston, VA, 487–496.
Sun, M., and Meng, X. (2009). “Taxonomy for change causes and effects in construction projects.” Int. J. Project Manage., 27(6), 560–572.
Tilley, P. A., and McFallan, S. L. (2000). “Design and documentation quality survey designers’ perspectives.”, CSIRO—Building, Construction and Engineering, Melbourne, Australia.
Wambeke, B. W., Hsiang, S. M., and Liu, M. (2011). “Causes of variation in construction project task starting times and duration.” J. Constr. Eng. Manage., 663–677.
Watt, D. (1999). Building pathology principles and practice, Blackwell Science, Malden, MA.
Weerasinghe, I. T., and Ruwanpura, J. Y. (2009). “Automated data acquisition system to assess construction worker performance.” Proc., 2009 Construction Research Congress, ASCE, Reston, VA, 11–20.
Willis, T. H., and Willis, W. D. (1996). “A quality performance management system for industrial construction engineering projects.” Int. J. Qual. Reliab. Manage., 13(9), 38–48.
Zhu, K., Zhang, W., Zhu, G., Zhang, Y., and Lin, X. (2011). “BMC: An efficient method to evaluate probabilistic reachability queries.” Database systems for advanced applications, lecture notes in computer science, Vol. 6587, Springer, Berlin, 434–449.
Zuo, J., Zillante, G., and Coffey, V. (2009). “Project culture in the Chinese construction industry: Perceptions of contractors.” Australas. J. Constr. Econ. Build., 9(2), 17–28.
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
Volume 142 • Issue 2 • February 2016
Copyright
© 2015 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jan 26, 2015
Accepted: Jun 11, 2015
Published online: Aug 3, 2015
Discussion open until: Jan 3, 2016
Published in print: Feb 1, 2016
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Citations
Download citation
If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.