THE EFFECTS OF DESIGN CHANGES AND DELAYS ON PROJECT COSTS

This paper describes a study of a large design and manufacture enginee ring project, undertaken as part of a Delay and Disruption litigation. Design changes and delays in design approval would have caused delay to the project; in order to fulfil a tight time-constraint, management had to increase parallel development in the network logic, reducing d elay but setting up feedback loops that markedly increased total proje ct spend. Cognitive mapping was used to elicit the relationships, whic h suggested the use of System Dynamics to quantify the effects. Result s are described that show the effect of levels of design changes and a pproval delays, and their compounding effect. The wider implications o n modelling projects are also discussed.