An investigation of factors causing and impacting time and cost overrun in the global rail and other infrastructure project

My primary concern remains the same.

1. There is a lack of overall coherence through your research and it is unclear what is the new knowledge your work is bringing about

In your title, it says – investigating the causes of delay / cost overrun (but later your lit.review shows these are already known from previous research)
Research question says – how time and cost overrun impact delay – but time overrun is the delay itself
Hypotheses
H1 talks about delay causing failure
H2 talks about mitigation strategies

These 3 are talking about 4 different things (cause – impact- failure – mitigation)
2.The hypotheses statements are not written correctly. Please refer to the previous materials I have sent you on “writing a hypothesis”.
Firstly, there is a particular way of writing alternative and null hypothesis and testing based on that. Please refer to Dr. Rebels’ lecture or the resources that I have sent previously or any good resource available on the internet.

3. The literature review is very weak. I had previously sent you feedback on potential theories you can look at and also a similar work from where you can get some ideas. Please do take a serious look at all previously sent feedback. I know that there may be less literature about rail projects, but the theories etc. need to be there.

Solution:
You need to have a clear alignment from title, R obj, RQ, hypotheses, survey, analysis and conclusion.
Based on your questionnaire and the responses you received, I know that you have tried to list down all the delay / cost overrun factors found from lit. and asked respondents to rank them on a likert scale.You also have some group questions related to contract type / planning method /scheduling technique.

The one work around I can see, with the existing survey responses you have is try to see if there is a – difference in groups – based hypothesis testing which can be done to see if the factors encountered vary with the group – if it makes sense. But, then your entire intro / lt. review needs to be aligned accordingly.
e.g if there is a diff. in % of projects with time/ cost overrun based on contract type / planning technique type – your literature will need to heavily incorporate these.
Like seeing if in waterfall vs agile style are issues encountered different. You may need to contrast only relevant questions.

Based on your questionnaire and the responses you received, I know that you have tried to list down all the delay / cost overrun factors found from lit. and asked respondents to rank them on a likert scale.You also have some group questions related to contract type / planning method /scheduling technique.

1.Table of contents – needs numbering of sub-headings
2. Add a table of figures
3. Abstract- and conclusion – provide clarity on – what was known from literature review (theoretical and empirical) and what is the new part that your dissertation has discovered. – very important- clearly mention this
4. Hypothesis statements need to be written properly – what “variables” is it talking about? Don’t say effect of variable – but what exactly is the variable?
5. The grammar of null hypothesis needs to be corrected.
6. Literature review – you have referenced empirical studies – good. What theoretical models is your study based on – some examples related to your cost overrun can be found on Section 5 of this link: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224127798_Cost_overruns_in_large-scale_transportation_infrastructure_projects_Which_explanations_can_be_given#pf12

e.g. prospect theory, chaos theory, rational choice theory ,etc.
7. Overall proof read the entire work to fix all grammatical, sentence construction errors.
8. In your methodology section you have mentioned the sample size, you need to mention the population, how you chose the sample – probabilistic/ non-probabilistic, your technique is exploratory or explanatory, (explanatory has hypothesis testing), and how do you prove the validity and reliability of your research, and do talk briefly about any ethical issues.
The idea is no survey respondent should be identifiable. Your ethics section needs to talk about how you did on your survey, rather than what should be done.

9. Conclusion – clearly mention – as per lit. theroretical / and empirical what you found, what is your original contribution – make this part clear and obvious to the reader
Move your limitations and recco to conclusion chapter.
10. Add completed sample questionnaires to the appendix.