I was recently watching one of Activist Kebaso Moraro “vampire diaries” episodes and I could relate with one thing he mentioned; Construction time delays.
In fact, it reminded me of a project I was involved in as a project manager for the contractor where despite proper initial planning, we kept having delays.
But what are construction time delays and what causes them?
What is a time delay?
A time delay is when a construction project falls behind the schedule. In short, it is late to complete as planned.
A simple as this sounds, I can barely remember a project that we have completed on time.
Worse still, some projects even stall, as it is the case with many government’s projects.
So, what causes some of these time delays?
Adverse weather
You see, when it rains very heavily, many projects are really affected.
Imagine when doing excavations or some roads or even external painting and then it starts raining cats and dogs. You have no option but to stop and thus leading to loss of time.
My biggest issue with this has been some project managers failing to award extension of time to a contractor saying that they should have planned for the rains. Who plans for rains but God?
Rain patterns have in fact become very irregular in Kenya due to climatic changes. Anyway that is my opinion.
Delayed Payments to Contractors
The biggest elephant in the room when it comes to government projects in Kenya.
In most projects, the contractor does the works, then applies for payment for the work done. Typically, this is normally done on monthly intervals.
Now, most clients can be very cheeky and delay payments to the contractor, sometimes even for several months. This severally affects the contractors’ cash flow and he is unable to pay wages or even procure materials.
Approvals
You need a lot of licenses and permits to proceed with a construction project in Kenya. These are the construction permit, business permit, DOSH, NEMA, KRA compliance, NCA annual practicing license amongst others.
The process of applying for these permits takes time and you can’t proceed with a project without them and if you do, the authorities will shut down the site.
Changes to Initial Design
We were working on a botanical garden and midway, the client come along with some designs that he saw abroad and wanted incorporated in their project.
To this date, we are yet to resume site as we await the consultants to finalize on the new design.
It has been expensive for us as we have to mobilize again for resources such as labour and equipment once we resume site. That is how changes in design can affect a project.
Shortages / delay in supply of material
In another case, we delayed a project for a whole 6 months, when all of a sudden a subcontractor told us that the boards they were importing from Turkey had been delayed at the Port of Sri Lanka. And since we could not proceed with works without the joinery works in place, we had to stall the project.
That project had some serious procurement issues as the client also delayed in supplying us with tiles citing a delay in the shipment clearance at the port of Mombasa.
Site Conditions
Ever heard of groundwater? This is water that instead of being found at the normal water table level, it very close to the surface level. Now, there is this site whereby we started excavations only for us to find the ground water, a condition that had not been indicated in the tendering process.
We had to re-plan and apply for extension of time for the additional works that arose thereafter.
Of course, the conditions necessitating a time disruption and causing a construction delay are quite many. Depending on the type of contract you are using, the list can be extensive. But the above mentioned are the quite common across the Kenyan Construction Industry.