Variation Orders and Their Effects of Erbil Governorate Projects

Variation order plays an important role in calculating the final cost and time. The paper aims to determine the causes of variation orders in projects performed between 2007-2014 in Erbil governorate projects. Data was collected from contract documents. Performed in the Erbil governorate projects from 2007-2014. The study seeks to identify the most significant causes of delays by assessing the common causes of delays in terms of frequency, severity and important indices of owners, consultants and contractors related to the implementation of public construction projects in Erbil Governorate. The data acquired from the questionnaire given to the engineers involved in executing of these projects and 73 forms were returned. The results showed that the ranking of overall causes of variation order from highest to lowest was "Contractor's financial difficulties", " Change of plans or scope by owner", "The required labor skill are not available", "Differing site conditions", "Owner's financial problems", "Design change originated by owner", "Errors and omissions in design", " The required equipment and tools are not available", Inadequate working drawing details", and " Change in design by the engineer or consultant". The source of "Errors and omissions in design", "Inadequate working drawing details”, and Change in design by the engineer or consultant" is consultant.


Variation order Definition
It is actually rare for a construction project to be completed without changes being made. The standard construction contract contains a provision authorizing the owner or owner reprehen sive to order changes or modifications to the project within the general scope of the contract. A change (variation) order is referred to as the document directing such changes (Nunnally, 2007) Mokbel (Mokbel, 2003) defined the variation (change) order as: "an action that specifies and justifies a change to the scope of a construction contract that alters the original time of completion of the total project cost, or both" (Cited by Enshassi et al. 2010)

The REPUBLIC OF IRAQ, MINISTRY OF CONSTRUCTING AND HOUSING, (2010) and the REPUBLIC OF IRAQ, MINISTRY OF PLANNING, LEGAL DEPARTMENT (1987)
authorize the engineer to make a variation in works as follows: The engineer shall make any variation in the form, quality or quantity of the works, or any part th ereof, which, in his view, may be necessary or desirable, and shall have the power to order the w orks to be carried out by the contractor. The contractor shall do any of the following: 1. Increase or decrease the quantity of any work included in the contract. 2. Omit any part of the work. 3. Change the character or quality or kind of any of the works. 4. Change the levels, lines, position, and dimensions of any part of the work, and 5. Execute additional work of any kind necessary for the completion of the works.

Types of Variation Orders
Variation orders are of different types based on benefit and detrimental or directed and constructive (nature) (Sherif, 2016).

Beneficial Variation Orders
Beneficial variation orders are issued for reducing the cost, time, or project difficulty. These variation orders lead to remove the extra costs and raise the benefits of the owner (Ndihokubwayo and Haup, 2009).

Detrimental Variation Orders
Detrimental variation orders that negatively affect the value of the owner or his performance. Due to financial difficulty, the owner may sacrifice the quality of the work (

Directed Variation Order
The owner directs the contractor to perform work that varies from that defined in the contract or is an addition to the stated work that specified in the contract. In keeping with the relevant clauses in the contract, guided variations are typically given. This form can also be deductive in nature. The scope of the work could, for example, be reduced from the original scope of the work specified in the contract. After the owner's order, the contractor will determine the works needed and agree with the owner on the works (A-Dubaisi, 2000).

Construction Variation Order
Due to an informal approving act or guiding a change by an act or failure to act as per contract, this type of variation is provided. In this case, the contractor will conduct various works other tha n those specified in the contract, increasing the contractor's costs and/or time of performance, wh ich must be treated as a variation order (Sherif, 2016;Klee, 2015).

Impacts of Variation Orders
The impact of variation of orders is mostly an increase in the project's cost (i.e., cost overruns), delay in delivery of the project (or time overrun), delay in payment, quality degradation, etc. Later details of these impacts will be covered in some previous research works. Out of 81 projects, the data of 72 projects (about 90%) are obtained.

Causes of Variation Orders
The occurrence of variation orders in the construction industry is a regular trend all over the world. They are the major problems in construction projects. Many research papers were conducted locally and abroad. (Agele and Al-Hassan, 2009) studied the reasons for cost deviation in Iraqi construction projects. They concluded that the major causes are: the inability of the company to meet project requirements, inadequate planning, inaccurate estimation of the cost, delayed cash flows by owners, inefficient executive manager of the project, lack of control by the time of the project or predict the date of its end, the negative impact of the population in the project area, multiple sources of the decision and the overlap of powers, poor performance of the contractor. (Mustafa and AL Hariri, 2015) studied the causes of variation in a Syrian project. They showed that the owner or the engineer supervising the project is the party who is responsible for change orders in the project. The ten most important causes of variation of highway projects studied by (Msallam, et al., 2015) are change of schedule, ambiguous design details, change of plan or scope, the conflict between contract documents, lack of coordination, safety considerations, client financial problem, change in design by the consultant, socio-cultural factors, and change in government regulations. (Alaryan, et al., 2014) identified the causes and effects of variation orders on construction projects in Kuwait. The first cause was the change of plans by the owner, and the increase in cost was the first effect. Otherwise an increase in the cost of the project is the first effect. (Enshassi et al., 2010) identified the ten top causes of variation orders in Ghazza projects are: lack of materials and equipment spare parts due to closure, change in design by the consultant, lack of consultant's knowledge of available materials, errors and omission in design, conflicts between contract documents, owners financial problems, lack of coordination among project parties, using the inadequate specification for local markets by international consultant, internal politics, and change The main source of the causes was the owner due to financial problems, changes in mind, or noncompliant design with the owner's requirement. The second main cause was Consultant wrongs and canceling in design, specifications, and contract documents clashing. In roadway construction projects, (Ismail, et al., 2012) studied the causes and effects of variation orders. The most causes of variation orders were: the change in scope by the owner, errors, and omissions in design, and site condition changing. Also, the financial difficulties of contractors are the critical factors causing variation orders. The study in a mega hydropower project in Pakistan (Hanif, et al., (2016) showed that the error and omissions in design, change in scope, and change in design were among the three causes of variation orders. In Oman, a study was conducted on the change orders and effects on public construction projects (Al-Nuaiml, et al., 2010). It was found that the most frequent causes are the clients' additional works and design modification. The second, later cause was due to the nonavailability of manuals and procedures. (Sherif, 2016) showed that the three significant causes of change orders for the repetitive residential units in Egypt are change of plans or scope by the owner, change of schedule sequence by owner, and change in specifications by owner. Table 1. illustrates the summarized causes of variation orders referred to previously. With an average of 16 percent cost overruns, more than 95 percent of the projects surveyed were affected with an average of 16 percent cost overruns and more than 98 percent of the projects wer e affected with time overruns of more than 40 percent.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
The data collection is conducted in two phases. The first step consisted of literature reviews similar to previous studies of local and international countries through papers, conference proceedings, the internet, and international project management journals. The purpose of reviewing is to get information on the causes of variation orders likely to be occurring in our region. The second phase involved developing the questionnaire that provides a list of 26 causes of variance orders found in construc tion projects. To minimize the low number of a handdelivered questionnaire strategy was used for respondents. The questionnaire was broken down into three primary ele ments. The first part was to describe the concept and purpose of the survey and to iden tify the field of research in question. The profile of the respondent was requested in the second section, such as the number of years employed in the building and the number of projects executed successfully by them. The third part concerned the causes of the order of variance in the construction project in the form of a simple statement. Variation order considerations are grouped into 4 main participant categories: owner, consultants, contractors and other externals. Two measures, frequency and severity, are used for each factor. The respondents have four choices for each measure in the form of digit ranking from 1 to 4. Table 2 shows the ordinary scale, and the given digits 1, 2, 3, and 4 are a numerical indication of the dissimilar level of grade. Questionnaires were delivered to respondents in the public project from almost all governorate sectors who directly participated in the construction of projects as a project manager. The procedure used was aimed at establishing the relative importance of various factors of a project variation order. The following statistical techniques were used to analyze the data:

Frequency Index:
The following equation is used to evaluate the causes of the order of variance based on the frequency of respondents' occurrences. (1) Where the xi = constant expressing weight (scale) given to i th response: 1, 2, 3, 4 fi = variable expressing frequency of i th response i = response category index of 1, 2, 3, 4

Severity Index:
The following equation is used in the manner of frequency to evaluate the severity index: Where si = variable expressing the severity of i th response.

RESULT ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION
Based on results and literature review, some common causes are available and discussed in the followings.

Respondent Profiles
The respondents are all practices engineers who carried out and supervised public projects in most facilities in the governorate institution; local government, works and housing, municipality, highways, irrigation, water supply, wastewater, electricity, religious affairs (Awqaf), and health. As shown in Table 3, the respondent's years of experience differs from 1 year to more than25 years. The number and percentage of projects carried out and supervised by respondents are 1 to 50 projects as shown in Table 4, and the types of projects and their percentages are shown in Table 5. The results of frequency, severity, and important indices are shown in Table 6. The highest rank of causes is due to contractor'sfinancial difficulties related to the frequency Journal of Engineering Volume 27 May 2021 Number 5 84 index of 61.8 percent (second rank), severity of 68.5 (first rank) percent, and an important index of 42.3 percent of the first rank. The second cause is the modification of plans or scope by owner with highest frequency of 62 percent, severity of 63.3 percent (second rank) and important index of 39.2 percent the second rank. The third cause of variation order is the required labor skill are not available (lack in skill labor) which is related to the contractor. Table 6. Evaluation of Causes of Variations. Table 7 presents the ten top of most causes related to owner and contractor which are: "Contractor's financial difficulties", " Change of plans or scope by owner", "The required labor skill are not available", "Differing site conditions", "Owner's financial problems", "Design change originated by owner", "Errors and omissions in design", " The required equipment and tools are not available", Inadequate working drawing details", " Change in design by engineer or consultant". While out of these causes, only three of them, which are "Errors and omissions in design", "Inadequate working drawing details", and" change in design by the engineer or consultant," are due to the consultant. The third source of variation order is the consultant's errors and omissions in design, inadequate working drawing details, and change in design by the engineer or consultant within the ten top causes of variation orders. Considering the source of variation order, the first ranked causes are "Change of plans or scope by owner", " Errors and omissions in design ", and " Contractor's financial difficulties " relating to owner, contractor and consultant respectively as shown in Table 8.