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Abujnah, M S (2010) Towards a risk management framework for Libyan house-building projects, Unpublished PhD Thesis, School of the Built Environment, University of Salford.

  • Type: Thesis
  • Keywords: decision making; government; housebuilding; interview; Libya; payment; project management; risk identification; risk management; statistical analysis; uncertainty
  • ISBN/ISSN:
  • URL: http://usir.salford.ac.uk/id/eprint/43048/
  • Abstract:
    Time and cost overrun problems are commonplace throughout the world in the construction industry. Libyan House-Building Projects (LHBP) experience the same dilemma and often to a greater extent. This is attributed to both unexpected and expected factors in which risk and uncertainty were not effectively dealt with. A focus on risk management is therefore necessary to improve the current project's poor performance. The purpose of this study is to provide a Libyan Risk Management Framework (LRMF) to improve the performance of the construction project management process in LHBP through investigating and analysing time and cost overrun causes. In addition, establishing a comprehensive risk response to eliminate or mitigate the major threats in these types of projects. The proposed framework will be developed to critically reflect a synthesis of the international risk management frameworks, the available literature regarding time and cost overrun factors, and expert's professional knowledge and expertise of working in the Libyan Construction Industry (LCI). The developed framework begins with risk identification which, in this particular work, was based on two means, namely: the review of previous published studies that are concerned with time and cost overrun in the construction industry; and semi-structured interviews and discussions with construction professionals. The main objective of this phase of research (first phase) was to gather a list of risk factors that could be responsible for time and cost overrun in LHBP. This list was further filtered, validated, and assessed through group discussion session conducted with a number of Libyan experts which represented the second phase of research. Based on the information obtained from the two earlier phases, a structured interview template was drawn up. This constituted the third phase of the study (i. e., the survey phase). Hence, a survey targeting construction professionals which comprises: local contractors; government officials; consultants; and international companies was carried out. A Kruskal-Wallis test has been used to test the variance in responses. The outcomes of this test revealed that, there is a consensus among the four construction-related groups with regard to assessing risk likelihood and risk consequences for the majority of the identified risk factors A statistical analysis has been employed to test the strength of relationship between the results of group experts and the findings of each individual group. Based on the results of Pearson's rank correlation test, it was concluded that there are strong associations between different groups on ranking the identified risk factors. The research outcomes concluded that "delays in progress payments causing cash flow problems to the contractor"; "shortage of skilled labour"; "unqualified decision makers"; and "slowness of the owner's decision making process causes suspension of work" were identified as the most important risk factors leading to construction delay and cost overrun in LHBP. Therefore, risk responses, in the form of recommendations to relevant parties, have been suggested to eliminate or mitigate these major threats.