Delays in construction projects and scheduling reducing techniques

Delays are a widely studied worldwide phenomenon in the construction industry with temporal, financial and qualitative impact on the project itself, the stakeholders and the financial development of a country. Greece has seen particularly large numbers of delays in projects, however the issue has not been systematically studied or dealt with accordingly. Based on the above, and within the frame of this dissertation, a survey in the Greek construction industry took place in order to investigate: the size of the problem of delays and their impact, their causes, methods of detection and analysis of the delays and methods chosen to address the delays and achieve the optimizing of the project duration. Since the detection of delays as well as dealing with these are done using scheduling techniques, the research also addressed whether the Greek construction industry employs professional scheduling and which methods and tools are used.