Abstract:
The owner, lending organizations, contractors, or designers need early cost estimate at the very early stages of the project for several purposes, including but not limited to the determination of the feasibility of the project, financial evaluation of number of alternatives and establishment of initial budget (Mehmet, 2005). However, very limited design information is usually available for a project at this early stage. The scope is usually not finalized at the conceptual phase and predicting the likely cost of building works is a challenging task. Under such circumstances, a quick, inexpensive and reliable technique is necessary in order to obtain a cost estimate with reasonably accuracy. Previous researchers have exhaustively studied the causes of delays and cost overruns but little research has been done on methods of predicting construction project cost and time in Kenya. Models developed in other countries cannot be applied in Kenya due to different construction environment and therefore the contents of variables differ. The objective of this study is to develop models for forecasting time and cost of building construction projects at the inception stage of a project. To achieve this, models for realistic estimation of contract duration and budget were developed based on data collected through a survey of construction practitioners comprising of architects, engineers, contractors and quantity surveyors. Questionnaires were used to collect information on past public and private building projects performance in terms of cost and time. Multiple regression technique was used in the analysis of data for the study obtained from 45 respondents.
The study developed models for forecasting project duration, FCT = 37.58 + 6.43NOFL + 0.001FLAR and final cost, FCC = -13.370+22.659NOFL+.012FLAR. The model for forecasting project duration was recommended for use.
