Abstract

The construction industry has made a major contribution to the growing economy of New Zealand. Due to its rapid development in the past two decades, most construction projects have encountered time delays and cost overrun issues, which have caused a constant stream of disputes in construction. An Infometrics report (Kiernan, 2022) highlights “Current
projects across various construction projects taking between 67% and 111% longer than normal to reach the milestone of their first inspection”. Poor management, supervision and coordination, and lack of communication were reported to be major causes of construction project failures. It was observed that there was scope for site meetings to contribute to resolving these issues. In our study, a mixed approach of quantitative and qualitative methods was adopted with the aim
of exploring, through a survey and a literature review, how site meetings contribute to successful construction project completion. The questionnaire included 11 questions for which 96 participant responses were received and analysed. The major finding of this research was that the site meetings have the potential to significantly resolve a range of construction project-related issues such as quality, safety, scheduling, payment and stakeholder communication. Site meetings provide
an opportunity to evaluate the resource utilisation onsite, review the progress of the construction project, and facilitate scheduling and coordinating upcoming tasks. Furthermore, the research identified the key contributing factors as being the lack of coordination, traffic and site conditions, and unclear communication influencing contractual parties that do not attend the site meetings.

Keywords:
Construction, Poor management, Project failure, Site meetings, Successful completion

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