Prioritization of Critical Success Factors for Construction Projects in Kenya

International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS) | Volume II, Issue VII, July 2018 | ISSN 2454-6186

Prioritization of Critical Success Factors for Construction Projects in Kenya

Elijah Kamau Mwangi¹, Jane Gathenya², John Kihoro³

 ^{1, 2}Department of Entrepreneurship, Technology, Leadership and Management, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, Kenya
³Department of Computing and eLearning (DCeL), The Cooperative University of Kenya, Kenya

Abstract— A large number of Critical Success Factors (CSF’s) exist that play a major role in influencing the success of construction projects. However, their influence on project success at each phase of the project life cycle has received little attention. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to evaluate and prioritize the CSF at each phase of construction projects in Kenya. The practice in the Kenyan construction industry has been to evaluate project success based purely on the Time, Quality and Cost (TQC) criterion leading to incomplete and misleading assessments. This study discovered other evaluation criteria that are inherent in the Kenyan construction industry that included the organizational benefits, user benefits, project team members’ benefits, the Iron-Diamond, and the social benefits success criteria. The results showed that human related factors and external environmental factors were the most dominant CSFs while the project management actions was the least dominant CSF during conceptualization, planning, and execution phases but the dominance was reversed during the termination phase.

Keywords— project success, critical success factors, success criteria, prioritization, construction projects

I. INTRODUCTION

Success of projects is of great importance to the project sponsors, project managers and to other project stakeholders. As more and more organizations, come to the realization that strategic objectives at the corporate level are best achieved through projects, the search for the factors that lead to successful project delivery and outcomes have become an appealing area of study to the project management research community. This is evident from the large number of published research articles in this area. Most studies in the project management literature have focused on project success and failure (e.g. Pinto & Slevin, 1988; Belassi & Tukel, 1996; Cooke-Davies, 2002; Westerveld, 2003; Fortune & White, 2006). However, the concept of project success has remained a subject of conjecture without any agreement being reached by various project stakeholders (Wateridge, 1998; Baccarini, 1999; Hyvari, 2006; Koutsikouri, Dainty & Austin, 2006). Another challenge to the project management community has been the question of which criterion to use for evaluating project success.

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