Abstract :

The Electricity and Water Authority (EWA) is spending millions every year on projects
to develop the water and electricity network in Bahrain. Each project has three main
types of stakeholder—project owner (EWA), consultant and contractor—and one of the
main criteria of a successful project is on-time delivery. This cross-sectional study aims
to investigate the different perspectives of the main stakeholders on project time
management, the main causes of project delay, the effects of such delay and the
measures for minimizing it. This study is mainly based on primary data collected using
a questionnaire, which was administered to 90 employees selected randomly from a
pool of main stakeholders—30 for each of the three types.
The study concludes that project time management at EWA is generally good, and the
most frequent type of delay of EWA projects is excusable delay. The main cause of
delay is the project owner, specifically in securing permission to start the work and
delivering the site for work. The main effects of such delay are time overrun and cost
overrun. The three project stakeholders disagree on the causes of delay, but overall,
they agree on its effects. Spearman‘s correlation analysis indicates that there is a
positive relationship among the main causes of delay and, overall, a slightly positive
relationship among the effects of delay if any.
Finally, this study has found that the best measures for minimizing project delay are
special attention to securing permission to start work, proper planning and definition of
scope to minimize variation orders, frequent coordination among parties and site
management and supervision.