Analyzing the causes of delay in development projects by fuzzy analysis

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to identify and prioritize the causes of delay in development projects and present strategies to reduce the delay. Design/methodology/approach The discussion includes the failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) method for converting survey data, fuzzy risk priority number (FRPN) for prioritizing the delay factors, and the proposed solutions to reduce the delay of projects. Findings The research provided prioritized delay factors to show the importance of each delay factor in the projects by analyzing the survey data. Results show that lack of proper contract price to win the tender has the most impact on the delay of development project between delay factors. Originality/value This study offered some guidelines for people who are involved with contracts and development projects, so that they can use these suggestions to prevent possible factors that may cause delay in projects. This paper also demonstrated a process of analyzing the data which was provided by FMEA and FRPN methods.