System archetypes underlying the problematic behaviour of construction activity in Kenya

Abstract

Construction activity in Kenya fluctuates excessively and grows very slowly. This feature causes adverse effects on the construction industry. When a drastic fall in construction activity occurs, the industry loses its production capacity; manpower moves to other industries in the country and abroad and many construction firms go bankrupt. During recovery, the shortage of contractors leads to increase in tender prices and sometimes poor quality work. These problems are best understood by modelling the construction industry as a system, because the systems approach to problem resolution involves an overarching study of the forces that give rise to the problems while simultaneously avoiding the distractions arising from excessive scrutiny of the problems themselves. In this paper, a system dynamics study of the construction industry of Kenya is presented. The system archetypes underlying the problematic behaviour of the industry are observed to be the balancing process with a delay phenomenon, coupled with the limits to growth phenomenon. It is recommended that (1) regulation of the response of the industry to changes in demand for its services; and (2) expansion of the construction market, could minimize fluctuations in construction activity and foster continual growth of the activity in Kenya.Construction industry, construction output, system dynamics, system archetypes, Kenya,

Construction Delays in Developing Countries: A Review

“…Previous studies found that delay in obtaining permits from local authority [7,18], government laws, regulation and bureaucracy, [4,17,45,92], and safety issues like work accident [13,35] are some potential delay factors. In addition, some political and environmental issues such as strike and other problems, national and local politics [6,67,95], and adverse weather [14,31,93] are some frequent factors of delay.…”

Evaluating planning strategies for prioritizing projects in sustainability improvement programs

“…Examples of system dynamics applications for project planning and management issues can be found throughout the research literature, including project fast-tracking failure (Ford and Sterman 1998), undesirable schedule performance (Abdel-Hamid 1988), change impacts (Cooper 1980, Rodrigues andWilliams 1997), and assessing rework impacts on project performance (Ford and Sterman 2003). System dynamics has also been applied in the construction industry, to topics including engineering economics and investment analysis (Senge 1980), bidding competition analysis (Kim and Reinschmidt 2006), project risk management (Nasirzadeh et al 2008), project cashflow management (Cui et al 2010), market fluctuation analysis (Mbiti et al 2011) and managing the complexity of information flow (Khan et al 2016). The widespread applicability of system dynamics modelling in these fields provides strong support for the use of this method in the current research.…”