Effects of Change Orders with Cost Growth, Schedule Growth, and Construction Intensity of Large Highway Projects

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

5-29-2018

Publication Title

Journal of Legal Affairs and Dispute Resolution in Engineering and Construction

Volume

10

Issue

3

First page number:

1

Last page number:

9

Abstract

Previous research had shown that change orders have a detrimental effect on cost growth and schedule growth of construction projects. These studies mainly concentrated on the amount of change orders on for building or maintenance projects. However, correlation of the number and percentage of change orders with cost growth, schedule growth, and construction intensity of new highway projects has not been studied. This study collected data from 185 projects from the State of Texas, whose costs amounted to more than $10M. The results showed that the average percentage of change order growth for these projects was 5.0%, and also found a significant positive correlation in change order growth with cost growth and schedule growth of these projects. The correlation coefficients of change order growth with cost growth and schedule growth were found to be 0.44 and 0.29, respectively. When the projects were divided into two groups based on the percentage of change order growth, the results showed that the cost growth and schedule growth significantly increased as the change order growth increased to greater than 5%. The number of change orders were significantly and positively correlated with cost growth (0.22) and schedule growth (0.30). When the number of COs increased by more than 20, then the cost growth and schedule growth increased significantly.

Keywords

Change order growth; Number of change orders; Texas Department of Transportation; Correlation

Disciplines

Construction Engineering | Transportation Engineering

Language

English

UNLV article access

Search your library

Share

COinS