Assessing the Critical Project Success Factors in the Road Construction Industry in Zambia
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Date
2024
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University of Lusaka
Abstract
This study, conducted in Zambia, aimed to investigate critical success factors influencing road construction projects. Employing a positivist research philosophy, a deductive approach, and a quantitative research design, the study focused on project planning, stakeholders' involvement, project funding, contractor's capacity, and project monitoring and evaluation. Through inferential statistics using SPSS version 26, the study utilized hypothesis testing, correlation analysis, principal component analysis and regression analysis to explore relationships among variables. The research findings, based on a thorough analysis of the data collected from 115 respondents whose demographic composition has 62.6% male and 37.4% female road construction professionals. The highest number of participants had an undergraduate degree (36.5%) followed by professional qualifications at 24.1%, master’s qualification 20% while those with diploma qualifications were the least at 19%. The data revealed significant correlations and impacts of the identified factors on the success of road construction projects. This data was collected over a period of less than six months due to limited time, but the KMO values which were above 0.6 show that the sample was sufficient. Project planning, stakeholder involvement and contractor capacity were the aspects which were found to have an influence on road construction project success in Zambia. The findings show that success of Zambia's road construction projects was not significantly impacted by project finance or monitoring and evaluation. The results of this research will give policy makers and players in the road construction industry the areas to focus on or which will determine if projects will be a success. They also give players information which can be used to
create tools which target ensuring that project planning, stakeholder involvement and contractor capacity are done thoroughly. It would be good for future researchers to investigate other critical success factors not explored in this study.
Keywords: Critical success factors; road construction; project success; project management.