Determinants of project management success

One of the features of the construction industry over the last two decades or so, has been the use of project management (PM) concept of building procurement. evidently, the PM approach has proved its success in certain types of projects. However, statistics show that a significant number of large publicly funded projects, which are managed under the PM concept, have overran on time, overran on cost and performed poorly on safety. This paper presents some findings of a PhD research which sought to identify the cuases of success and failure of the PM technique in railway engineering projects. It reports the preliminary results of the pilot study, which obtained the views of over 180 different client organisations, project managers, design consultants and contractors as to what determines project success. A survey questionnaire was designed with 46 factors, covered under four major sections, namely managerial, Organisational, Project Control and Project Systems. The initial analysios of the survey suggests that project management capabilities, cost estimation, work definition, client criteria and project objectives were among the highly rated factors that determine the success of PM projects. Future research will consist of measuring the performance of success criteria against 32 detailed case studies. The aim is to show the factors that are associated with outstanding, average and familiar projects.