Examination of the correlation of critical success and delay factors in construction projects in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia

The goal of all parties involved in a construction project—owners, contractors, or consultants, in either the private or public sector—is to successfully complete it on schedule, within a planned budget, with the highest quality, and in the safest manner. Construction projects are frequently influenced by either success factors that help project parties reach their goal as planned, or delay factors, that stifle or postpone project completion. Accurately identifying success and delay factors can help project parties reach their intended goals with greater efficiency. This study extracted seven of the most important success and delay factors according to the literature (14 total success and delay factors), and then examined correlations between them to determine which were the most influential in preventing project delays. Two surveys were distributed throughout the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The first examined how project owners and contractors that collaborated on the same project perceived success and delay factors, while the second examined the perceptions of engineers in general. Data was collected and evaluated by statistical methods to measure the strength and direction of the relationship between critical success and delay factors, to examine owners' and contractors' evaluations of projects' critical success and delay factors, and to evaluate the influence of critical success factors on critical delay factors. Additionally, one and two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) has been used to examine how the group or groups evaluated the influence of the critical success factors in avoiding or preventing each of the delay factors, and which success factors were perceived as most influential in avoiding or preventing critical delay factors. The research found that sound organization planning efforts and a competent and experienced project manager helped to avoid many critical delay factors, while adherence to safety precautions and procedures and a project team's motivation and goal orientation were the least influential among the seven success factors.