Effects of Procurement Documentation Errors on the Cost Performance of Construction Projects in Nigeria

Abstract

Considerable efforts have been made in literature to mitigate the occurrence of errors in construction projects without much results. Previous studies on construction errors overly focused on design errors, neglecting errors which may originate from other construction procurement documents. Errors in procurement documents often undermine the attainment of construction project objectives in terms of completion within agreed time, quality and cost. Yet, this phenomenon finds inadequate explanation in the literature. This study was undertaken to evaluate errors in construction procurement documents, ascertain the difference in the impacts of documentation errors in different procurement methods, and determine the influence of documentation errors on the cost performance of construction projects. The respondents, architects, engineers, builders and quantity surveyors (n=81), were selected using convenient and snowballing techniques, and the data were analyzed using severity index (SI), mean score (SC) and Kruskal Wallis test. Based on the respondents’ opinions, errors in project contextual factors have the highest rank in terms of impact on the cost performance of projects followed by errors in project time schedule and design errors. The Kruskal Wallis test confirmed that these three highest ranking errors have significant effects on the eventual cost performance of projects. Clients and project managers should ensure that contextual factors are fully understood by project participants in order to obtain procurement documents that are devoid of errors. This study opines that construction procurement documentation errors should be assessed by their impacts on cost project performance, and not merely by their occurrence.