Critical Success Factors Influencing the Performance of Construction Industry

Abstract

Project managers would have a clear understanding of which aspects of projects might be critical for their successful completions. For a project to be successful, it is essential to understand the project requirements right from the start and go for project planning which provides the right direction to project managers and their teams and execute the project accordingly. A successful project is one that is delivered on time and managed within the budget, Time, cost and quality have been recognized as "triple constraint" or important elements of project success. The study of project success and critical success factors is often considered as one of the vital ways to improve the effectiveness of project delivery. Successful construction projects greatly depend on how the project has been managed and controlled. The critical success factors are more useful in decision-making support.. The major objective of this study was to identify, categorize, and prioritize a general set of critical success factors for construction sectors of various backgrounds. This study relied mainly on analytical, descriptive and field study methodologies. A questionnaire was designed in the light of the literature review and tested by pilot study, and then it is applied on a sample of 100 contracting companies. Collected data is manipulated by SPSS software using many statistical tools as, frequencies, percentile values, Means, Pearson co-relation coefficient, regression analysis and One-Way ANOVA test. I.INTRODUCTION Project is a complex, non-routine, one-time effort limited by time, budget and resource and performance specifications designed to meet customer needs. A construction project is completed through a combination of many events and interactions, planned or unplanned, over the life of a facility, with changing participants and processes in a constantly changing environment. Project managers would have a clear understanding of which aspects of projects might be critical for their successful completions. For a project to be successful, it is essential to understand the project requirements right from the start and go for project planning which provides the right direction to project managers and their teams and execute the project accordingly. A successful project is one that is delivered on time and managed within the budget, Time, cost and quality have been recognized as "triple constraint" or important elements of project success. The study of project success and critical success factors (CSFs) is often considered as one of the vital ways to improve the effectiveness of project delivery. Successful construction projects greatly depend on how the project has been managed and controlled. The critical success factors are (CSFs) are more useful in decision-making support. The study of project success and critical success factors (CSFs) is a means of understanding and thereby improving the effectiveness of construction projects. In developing countries, performance measurement of construction projects has become even more important due to its immense potential in addressing the problem of poverty, unemployment, inequitable distribution of resources in different regions etc. Academic researchers with a view to overcoming the limitations of the traditional performance evaluation criteria of time, cost and quality have suggested the inclusion of additional measures of performance. These include safety of the project site, environmental impact, community/client/customer satisfaction etc. None of the above has provided a balanced set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) which would capture all essential and unique features of a public sector construction project. Further, these studies have not talked about the appropriate facilitating factors that can help project managers achieve success on KPIs identified above. The identification of these factors, also known as critical success factors (CSFs), is very important for ensuring success of any project because it enables project managers to commit resources on specific factors. The CSFs have been classified in various ways by the researchers (as has been revealed in Literature Review Chapter) based on the common characteristic features of construction projects. However, there is hardly any study which has attempted to identify CSFs of construction projects based on the KPIs of the same specifically with reference to public sector construction projects. With this backdrop, the present study is an attempt to identify the KPIs amongst construction projects and on the basis of these KPIs, identify appropriate CSFs relevant for success of public sector construction projects and find out the influence of these CSFs on project success. The relationship between project success and overall project performance in terms of the KPIs is also investigated in the current study. II. LITERATURE REVIEW Zarina Alias(2014) says that Critical success factors (CSFs) are inputs to project management practice which can lead directly or indirectly to project success. It encompasses many elements, which have to be synchronized to ensure the project delivery on time.The purpose of this study is to identify the extent of the relationship between CSFs and project performance.