A comparison of strategies for reducing variations

Most building contracts make provisions for the contract administrator to issue orders for variations from the original design. Often, these changes involve additional cost and disruption to work already under way, leading to cost and time overruns. Thus, reducing variations is one of the prerequisites of keeping the cost within budget and completing the project on time. The main objective of this paper is to investigate methods of reducing variations. A series of structured interviews were carried out with the practitioners in the construction industry to identify the prevailing strategies for variation reduction. The identified strategies then formed the basis of a questionnaire which was sent randomly to 100 construction firms in Australia and Malaysia, respectively. The respondents were asked to rank the relative usefulness of the identified strategies for variation reduction. Thirty-two sets of questionnnaires from Australia and 33 sets from Malaysia were returned, respectively, which represented an ...