Investigating the Causes of Escalation of Disagreements over Delay Assessments

Project delays are a common occurrence in the construction sector. Such delays generate disputes over questions of law, fact and/or delay assessments. The last are costly, persistent and prevalent worldwide which has produced a role for professionals specialising in construction delay analysis. Although construction delays are inevitable, the escalation of delay disagreements from claims into disputes is often avoidable as construction contracts typically offer claims (or extension of time) procedures to resolve such disagreements before they become full-fledged disputes. Although this is an underresearched area, the published literature suggests that the main cause of the escalation of delay claims into disputes is unavailable and/or inadequate data. In this study, twenty-one private disputes were examined for their key disagreements. These cases reveal that while deficiency and inadequate quality of project data were indeed factors in these disputes, they were not the only ones, or indeed the main factors that caused the escalations of claims into disputes. The deliberate lack of transparency, selective interpretation of material data, and the subjective adoption of the delay analysis methods are at least as important in creating and escalating such disagreements. Furthermore, the resulting interplay between the reluctance of actors to provide data, and the conflicting reasons behind the analysis of it results in a zero-sum game for the parties seeking the resolution of delay disputes. Such escalations could be partially or fully avoided by exploiting advances in information technology, introducing contractual delay assessment protocols and/or radical changes to the concept of ‘ownership’ of data.