On the Contribution from a Change in the Context of Cumulative Impact

Changes’ cumulative effects are often seen as the cascading ripple impact of multiple changes and can influence labor productivity in construction projects. Because individual change orders for scope modifications typically only quantify their immediate consequences, it is challenging to foresee the complete implications and properly account for them in the forward priced change orders. Though the synergistic effect has been generally recognized, the issue regarding how an individual change contributes to the cumulative impact has not been addressed in the literature, despite some study on the timing and magnitude of changes being done using statistical analysis. Through mathematical modeling and numerical analysis, this paper investigates how a change contributes to the cumulative impact on a project and the lost labor productivity when considering the issue from the perspectives of timing on initiation, resolution and implementation, and magnitude.