Abstract
Reducing project execution time is an important aspect in today's construction industry. In practice, most construction projects are delivered behind schedule. This creates an incentive to find methods, processes and techniques to deal with elements which steal time and bottlenecks which cause delays. This paper address the magnitude, frequency and type of time-thieves and bottlenecks in various phases of construction projects from different construction firms and organizations in the public sector in Norway. It also discusses remedies to mitigate time thieves and bottlenecks. The questionnaire used was designed and tested to give a broad and open data collection. The purpose was to collect opinions from senior project managers and project members in order to identify time-thieves, bottlenecks and remedies and analyse the data to assertain if there are common and/or different opinions or perspectives in public and in private sectors. This study will provide an insight into the problem, time-thieves and bottlenecks, itself. The firms in this study are part of a larger national programme called SpeedUp. The programme focuses on every aspect of speeding up projects. The SpeedUp programme is a 10 million USD research programme with 5 researchers and 7-8 PhD students. It is linked to Project Norway which is a research-based collaboration of Norwegian project-based organizations in the public and private sector.