Causes of Change Orders in the Jordanian Construction Industry

Abstract

Change orders are common and clearly noticeable in Jordanian construction industry. Several studies have identified change orders as significant problem in Jordanian construction projects, and they mainly cause delay and cost overrun. This situation spurs the researchers for investigating the significant causes of change orders in construction projects. Thus, this paper aims to determine the main causes of change orders in the Jordanian construction private sector which responsible for significant cost overrun. Both qualitative and quantitative methods, i.e. interview and questionnaire techniques, were used to achieve this aim. Interviews were conducted as the first stage of data collection, and the results formed the basis of the questionnaire, which was distributed across the Jordanian construction sector. Content analysis was used to analyse the interview responses, while factor analysis, correlation and the Severity Index (SI) were used to analyse the questionnaire results. The findings identified three main categories of causes of change orders in private sector, namely engineering causes, causes related to the client, and circumstances of the project, with sub-causes in each category which are related to each other in significant ways and which affect each other.

Causes of Design Change Depending on Power Project-Types in Ghana

“…Similarly, Lature and Hinge [22], through an extensive questionnaire and two case studies, identified 16 causes of design change, and concluded that of the variables that induce changes in construction projects, changes in scope or plan by the owner are the most common. In the private Jordanian construction sector, design change causes that are responsible for cost overrun are broken down into three main categories: engineering causes, causes related to clients, and circumstances of the project, with four, four, and two causes, respectively [8]. Additionally, a correlation was established to understand the relationship between the causes of change for each category.…”

“…The internal validity of quantitative techniques is attained by structuring a questionnaire to quantify what it is intended to quantify [8], a technique which was employed in this study. For all three subdivisions, the external validity was determined by using a sufficient number of participants who represented various industry players.…”

“…Previous studies have covered much ground when it comes to design change. Researchers have focused on important topics on design change such as its causes [8,9], its impacts [5,10,11], its effects on cost [12,13], its impact on schedules [14], the parties responsible for design change, its root causes, its management and other impact aspects that contribute significantly to the body of knowledge on the subject. However, the majority of previous studies on design change have focused on residential and commercial building projects and civil areas.…”

“…However, the majority of previous studies on design change have focused on residential and commercial building projects and civil areas. For example, [4][5][6][15][16][17] describe design changes related to residential buildings, and [9,18] describe design changes in road construction projects and also in general construction phases [2,5,6,8,15,18]. Despite the fact that most disciplines have similar causes and effects of design change, each discipline has its own key approach to the construction process and scope of work, resulting in a variety of underlying causes and concerns, as well as changes in management strategies.…”

The Causes Influencing the Occurrence of Variation Orders in the Construction of Buildings

“…Change or variation orders are two terms that are usually used interchangeably in practice (Jarkas and Mubarak, 2016). Some definitions specify change orders as variation orders (Alshdiefat and Aziz, 2018). One of the significant situations facing the construction project is a matter of variation orders during the construction phase (Mohammad, et al, 2017).…”