The Impact of Project Performance on Customer Satisfaction

Abstract

Project management performance, which means the overall capability of the performing project team to deliver the project to satisfy the customer’s requirements, has always been considered as one major key in achieving customer satisfaction, especially in a business-to-business organizational relationship. In this research, the researchers tried to find out how project performance actually impacts upon customer satisfaction. The project performance consisted of variables project scope management performance, project schedule management performance, project cost management performance, project human resource management performance, project risk management performance, project quality management performance, project communication management performance and project stakeholders management performance. Method. This research used quantitative approach. Data is collected through questionnaire distribution to companies in Jakarta and Bandung. Samples are respondent’s representative of companies, hold managerial position or decision maker. From around 400 distrubuted questionnaire, this researched managed to collect 112 valid response from 112 companies. Data is analyzed its validity and reliability and hypotheses testing employ regression analysis with SPSS software. Findings The research found that, In Indonesia, especially for the private sectors (93% of the respondents came from the private sectors, and only 7% come from public sectors), only four variables, which were project schedule, cost, human resources and risk management performance that significantly affected customer satisfaction. When the researcher interviewed 20 of the respondents most of them were the upper management in their organization, and most of them agreed on these findings. One of the most acknowledged reason for this is because most of the projects in the respondents’ projects were triggered by senior management decisions rather than fulfilling the organizations’ needs or the project deliverables’ users. These users were the ones who actually would use the project deliverables either in the form of products, applications, SOPs or even services. It was a very interesting finding, that many organizations actually conducted projects without actually needing the project’s outcomes. An organization should create a project to support its program, portfolio, vision and mission.