Conclusion & Recommendation Some Delays in EDTP project are considered inevitable and some are due to poor

action and judgement. When the contract bidding was awarded to MMC Gamuda in 2003 which was supposed to have ended by 2001, this has caused delay to entire project and this inevitable as political factor might have been involved. The incident of breakage of Titi Hitam river bund is due to poor judgement and action by contractor which has caused delay upon the project. Their careless action has caused Penang state government to issue a cease due to a solid reason to protect the civilians. Rise of fuel and building material price is a sign of poor judgement and estimation on the parties, contractor and client which should have foreseen this possibility since the project takes a period of more than a year. Prices fluctuate annually and this has caused delay whereby budget needs to be recalculated and project is halted. The unsettled land acquisition during the construction is also due to poor judgement as this should have been addressed and completed during the planning stage. Once all the required land is acquired and civilian that needed to be relocated have been compensated, only then the project have a green light to proceed. Land prices hike up annually, this affects the overall budget if land acquisition is not settled prior to starting the project. Once the project has started, land owners will surely take this opportunity of demanding for a higher price since the government has started the project and cancelling it due to high price of land is not exactly a wise option for major project like EDTP project. Civilian resettlement was reported still has not been settled in the middle of project, this delay imposes an ethical issue and may spark the rage of Malaysian who sees the one being relocated as the oppressed if they were not to be relocated and compensated appropriately. In conclusion, the EDTP project delays are generally due to human mistakes, poor judgement and estimation on planning and costing, disputes between major players of the project and some political influence which we cannot study them clearly due to vague and inconsistency of reports.

Recommendation

Political influence although is not possible to be left out completely in a nationwide scale project where major players from government and companies are involved, it can be put into minimal by having an external body which has no interest in any of the involved parties monitoring the cleanliness and transparency of the project especially when important processes such as tendering is going on. Careful and more stringent protocol may be applied to contractor during executing of the work to avoid any unwanted accident which can be viewed as irresponsible action. Prevention is better than rectification as on the project of this scale, all eyes will be on it, and any sort of incident will be judged and criticized by the news and general people, this affects the harmony of one country. All preliminary processes prior to commencement of project needs to be fully settled, and this rule has to be strictly followed by all parties otherwise we may anticipate a major delay in future. This is proven in the case of land acquisition and civilian relocation problems which are still in negotiation process despite the project have started more than 20%. This is quite unacceptable in the text of construction project flowchart. The government should employ several financial analysts to predict and foresee the fluctuation of prices of involved material and labour as the project takes more than 3 years and during these period, prices are expected to fluctuate therefore an agreement has to be made between client and contractor to compensate for these fluctuations.