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Challenges on Successful Completion and Delivery of Public Building Construction Projects: The Case of West Shoa Zone , Oromia,

Objectives: To identify the most common challenges or constraints on successful completion and delivery of construction projects in West Shoa Zone, Oromia, Ethiopia. Besides, this study focuses on stakeholder assessment on the identiﬁed constraints and rank challenges according to their impact on time, cost, and quality of the projects. Methods: A pilot study, questionnaire, and literature review were employed to collect primary and secondary data. For this purpose, 53 diﬀerent challenges were identiﬁed, categorized into six major group factors, and analyzed by relative importance index and correlation analysis using the SPSS software. Findings: The identiﬁed challenges/constraints were examined by construction stakeholders and ranked according to their impact on building construction projects. Accordingly, Inﬂation (RII=0.811), Inadequate design, and speciﬁcation (RII=0.794), Poor planning, monitoring, and feedback mechanism (RII=0.766), Delay in solving design problems (RII=0.766), and less ﬁnancing capability of the owner (RII=0.760) are the top 5 challenging factors inﬂuencing construction project delivery. Finally, the case study was conducted on selected projects to assess how many of the projects were aﬀected by the identiﬁed challenges using performance indicators such as scheduled performance index (SPI) and cost performance index (CPI). The average value of (CPI+SPI)/2 of the ﬁve selected projects was 0.785which reveals that the projects were under performance. Novelty: The impact ranking of most challenging factors aﬀecting successful completion and delivery of construction projects in West Shoa Zone, Oromia, Ethiopia were identiﬁed. Economic related factors such as inﬂation, less ﬁnancing capability of the owner, and economic instability in the country were the most challenging factors. The CPI and SPI values of selected projects were used as a control to clearly understand the project’s under performance. It is recommended that the concerned body should have a common understanding of those identiﬁed constraints and solve them according to their impact ranking.


Introduction
The construction industry is a fundamental economic sector that permeates most of the other sectors as it transforms various resources into constructed physical economic and social infrastructure necessary for socio-economic development (1) . It has important contributions to socio-economic development of the country (2) . It provides the basis upon which other sectors can grow by constructing the physical facilities required for the production and distribution of goods and services (3) . Ethiopia's construction industry has been rapidly expanding, accounting for a significant portion of the country's GDP and constituting an important component of domestic gross capital formation (2) .
Even though the advancement in the construction industry is increasing from time to time, the frequency of development and productivity of the construction industry is decreasing (4) . According to the study (4) , productivity denotes the efficiency with which the various inputs are converted into goods and services. The development of productivity in construction compared to total productivity seems to be different for a lot of countries in the world. The productivity of the construction industry in the United States of America, Germany, and Japan does not increase like its total productivity (5) . The three reasons for low productivity in the construction industry are the size of construction companies, the complicity of the industry, different understanding of all parties in the construction industry (5) .The main objective of construction stakeholders is to successfully deliver projects to end-users. However, construction projects have been facing different challenges which lead to cost overrun, time delay, poor quality, and lack sustainability (6) . These challenges may be any condition, such as temporal/spatial limitations and safety/quality concerns, which may prevent a project to achieve its goals (7) . The effective development of the industry needs identification of its challenges, long-term planning with objective indicators in place, and continual performance measurement and improvement practice (8) .
Even though the construction industry in all countries faces problems, the challenges and problems of developing countries are different from those in developed countries. These difficulties and challenges are present alongside a general situation of socio-economic stress, chronic resource shortages, institutional weaknesses, and a general inability to deal with the key issues. There is also evidence that the problems have become greater in degree and severity in recent years (9) . Eight construction industry problems in Ethiopia were identified through factor analysis of four sources, according to (8) . These problems were delay in construction industry delivery policy implementation and corruption, weak capacity of contractors and consultants, lack of collaboration and professionalism, and lack of benchmarking practice.
A building construction project is economical when it is completed on time, within budget, under the specifications, and to stakeholders' satisfaction (10) . Therefore, the impact of risks to the project should also be reflected in these indicators (11) . In Ethiopia, hardly few projects get completed on time and within budget since construction projects are exposed to uncertain environments because of such factors as construction complexity; the presence of various interest groups such as the project owners, end-users, consultants, contractors, financiers; materials, equipment, project funding; climatic environment; the economic and political environment and statutory regulations (3,8) . The performance of public building construction project delivery is usually evaluated on the framework set in the subject of contract agreement mainly; time of completion, quality of work performed, and amount of cost incurred for the construction (12) .
Successful completion and delivery systems of public building construction in the West Shoa Zone, Ethiopia have been facing different problems. A desk study shows that about 70% of public building construction in the Zone faces cost, time overrun, quality, and safety. These problems have been increasing and plaguing good governance problems in the region. The main objective of this study is to identify and rank key challenges in public building construction project delivery.

Research questions
The following are research questions that are the core value of this study: • What are the common challenges found in public building construction project delivery in the West Shoa Zone? • What are the critical constraints that affect time, cost, and quality performance of public building construction projects in the West Shoa Zone? • Is there any significant correlation between the client, contractor and consultant on public building construction challenges? • What is the performance of public building construction projects in the region?

Study Location
The study was conducted in West Shoa Zone, Oromia regional state, the western central part of Ethiopia. The zone has 22 Woreda (district).

Research Design
West Shoa Zone of Oromia Regional state has 22 Woredas where different building construction projects have been undertaken for social benefit and economic development in the region. Using Purposive sampling techniques, two public building construction projects from each Woreda were identified for investigation. Identification and categorization of the challenges on construction projects were identified using a literature review, desk study, and interview with construction stakeholders (clients, contractors, and consultants) in the region. Fifty three (53) challenges on public building construction project delivery were identified under six groups of factors. The questionnaire was developed to evaluate the frequency of identified problems with the five-point scale of ordinal measures. A total of 44 questionnaires were distributed to construction professionals working on specific projects in each Woreda, with 35 returned, accounting for 79.54% of the questionnaires.
Where, RII= Relative importance Index, Ni= number of the respondent that chose pi. Pi=1 to 5 on Likert scale, N= total number of questionnaire returned, Rv= Highest value in Likert scale The Spearman (rho) rank correlation coefficient, which is used to measure the differences in ranking among the groups of respondents scoring for various factors (i.e. clients versus consultants, clients versus contractors, and consultants versus contractors), was also computed using the SPSS software 20. The Spearman (rho) rank correlation coefficient for any two groups of ranking is given by the following formula: Where, Rho (ρcal): Spearman's rank correlation coefficient; d i : the difference in ranking between each pair of factors; and N: number of factors (variables). Cronbach's Alpha was also used to evaluate the reliability, internal consistency of measurement of the questionnaires. It was used for calculating internal consistency of all questions or a sub-group of questions.
Where, PT= Tau-equivalent reliability; δ ij= covariance between Xi and Xj; K= number of items; δ 2 X = item variances and inter-item covariance Finally, the case study was conducted on five randomly selected projects to evaluate the performance of the projects using performance indicators such as scheduled performance index and cost performance index. According to (29) the most commonly used performance efficiency indicators are the cost variance and schedule variance of the projects.

Results and Discussions
The questionnaire was analyzed to find out the most vital challenges affecting the public building construction project delivery in West Shoa Zone. Table 2 shows the respondent profile engaged in this study. From the table it can be shown that 28.57% were from the client-side, 31.43% were from the constructor and 40% are from a consultant with B.Sc. and above the educational level in all cases. This indicates that the respondents were reliable for the study.  Table 3 shows the reliability of the instrument to identify the challenges.Cronbach's alpha method was used to measure the reliability of the questionnaire. According to (30) the cut-off points for the reliability test includes; excellent reliability (0.90 and above), high reliability (0.70-0.90), moderate reliability (0.50-0.70), and low reliability (0.50 and below). Therefore, the reliability of this study's questionnaire has high reliability at an individual group of factors and excellent reliability as overall which can be used to measure the extent of the problems. Table 4 shows the overall respondent ranking for identified challenges on public building construction project delivery.From the respondent score, it can be deduced that the economic-related group of challenges (RII= 0.726) are the most important challenging group to influence building construction project delivery in West Shoa Zone. This was mainly because, Inflation (RII =0.811), less financing capability of the owner (RII=0.760), and lack of economic stability in the country.
The second most influencing group of challenges in the region was the technical -related group of challenges (RII= 0.722), whose most three significant factors are Inadequate design and specification (RII = 0.794), Poor planning, monitoring and feedback mechanism (RII =0.766), and delay in solving design problems (RII = 0.766). The social-related group of challenges (RII =0.675) were the third most significant factor affecting public building construction project delivery in West Shoa Zone. This was due to Civil unrest/ lack of political stability (RII=0.737) in which the region was considered as one of the epicenters for the Ethiopian political movement. Also, poor communication (RII=0.726) between construction stakeholders and the community was also another influencing factor on construction projects.
Following the social related group of challenges, the Legal-related group of challenges (RII = 0.634) ranks as the fourth most important challenge in construction projects. The influencing factors were lack of skill certification scheme (RII=0.669), difficulties in construct permit approval (RII=0.651), and disputes related to contractual documents (RII=0.646).
Environmental-related group of challenges (RII = 0.631) and another group of challenges (RII=0.575) were the last groups of factors accounts the rank from five to six respectively as shown in Table 5 below. Other Challenges 0.576 6 Table 6 the top 10 challenging factors affectingsuccessful completion and delivery of construction projects in the West Shoa Zone of Oromia regional state. Inflation (escalation of material price), inadequate design and specification, and poor planning, monitoring, and feedback mechanism were the top three challenging factors.
The Spearman (rho) rank correlation coefficient was used for measuring the differences in ranking between two groups of respondents scoring for various challenges (i.e. clients versus consultants, clients versus contractors, and consultants versus contractors). The result indicates that there is a positive correlation between all stakeholders as shown in Table 7. However, the result shows that the perception of stakeholder on factors challenging successful completion of construction projects were not strong enough on some challenges. This implies that there were disagreement between stakeholders on some challenging factors rather than having a common understanding of the factors that in reality exist and influence public building construction project delivery.
Finally, the case study was conducted on selected projects in West Shoa Zone to assess how much the projects were affected by the identified challenges. Data such as contract document, progress report, payment report of the completed and ongoing projects were collected from the Zonal construction Office as shown in Table 8. In this case, the Scheduled performance index (SPI) and Cost performance index (CPI) was used as performance indicators. The status of the projects was determined depending on the average value of CPI and SPI. If the average value https://www.indjst.org/ Improper resource allocation Technical related 0.743 9 10 Civil unrest/ lack of political stability Social related 0.737 10 of CPI and SPI >=1, "GREEN" = on track, 0.85 but <1.0, "YELLOW" = slightly behind schedule/ budget and <0.85 "RED" = needs immediate attention. From Table 9 it can be concluded that Shenan Sectorial office construction (G+2) is in good progress whereas Noonnoo Sectorial offices (G+3) were running slightly out of schedule and cost. However, Jeldu Woreda's office (G+2), Liiban Jaawwii Woreda Court office, and D/Iccinnii Sectorial Office (G+2) were affected.

Conclusion
Unsuccessful project completion and delivery harms the economic development of one country. Identifying challenges on construction project delivery is the first step to minimize bottlenecks associated with construction projects. This study aimed to identify challenges and on public building construction projects in the West Shoa Zone of Ethiopia and how many projects were affected by the challenges. 53 challenges were identified during the literature review and examined by construction stakeholders (client, contractor, and consultant) with the help of the relative importance index method. The result shows that 10 of the most frequent challenges on construction project delivery were identified. These are, Inflation, Inadequate design, and specification; Poor planning, monitoring and feedback mechanism; delay in solving design problems; less financing capability of the owner; unrealistic scheduling; lack of economic stability; inadequate budget allocation by the government; improper resource allocation and civil unrest/ lack of political stability are challenges influencing construction project delivery. The case study was conducted on selected projects as control values to assess how many of the projects were affected by the identified challenges using performance indicators such as scheduled performance index and cost performance index. The result reveals that, from 5 projects selected for case study, three projects were in critical condition that needed immediate attention and intervention.