ACTIVITY DELAY QUANTUM METHOD (ADQM)

The number of construction disputes are on the rise, especially that nowadays hardly any project completes on its originally agreed contractual completion date. It is noted however, that despite many advances in the ways and techniques by which delays can be assessed and ascertained, the current methods of delay analysis fall short from providing a convincing or a universally accepted technique for measuring delays and who may be held accountable for them. Current methods of analysis highly depend on the detection of a critical path (with highest negative total float) caused by a delayed activity and which is driving the project end date. Such techniques tend to put the blame on the party that owns that delayed activity only, but neglects all other delays that have occurred but are less critical (e.g. Time Impact Analysis). Other techniques rely on the concept of selecting one or more time slices or ?windows? and measuring the activities with the highest negative float within them, which again fails to consider other less critical delays in the activity network. Both the above techniques use the logic of the incomplete part of the schedule to predict the impacted end date of the project which may also be misleading as future activities are highly unpredictable. In this paper, a new method will be introduced, that does not depend on critical paths, programme logic, or future activities to measure delays but rather an analysis technique that will measure the types of delays that every activity in the schedule has suffered to arrive at definitive results to who caused the delays and by who much.