Assessing and Prioritizing the Critical Success Factors and Delays of Project Management Implementation: Empirical Evidence at Construction Projects in Jordan

Abstract

The main goal of this research is to examine and then prioritize the critical success factors (CSFs) and delay reasons across the project management implementation stage. The study adopted the qualitative approach to introduce a full classification of the CSFs and delay reasons in project management. A total of 44 articles were reviewed to mine the various CSFs and delays based on conclusions of previous literature. This review leads to define a matrix of factors that are aligned with the project management in the context of the Jordanian construction project. Besides, the questionnaire instrument was designed based on outcomes of the critical analysis of literature; this instrument was administrated to a sample of 198 respondents across 20 Jordanian construction projects. The study sample entailed project managers, engineers, and senior department heads who were asked to assess the relevance and importance of the extracted CFSs. The questionnaire instrument was designed based on a 5-points Likert scale. Further, the data analysis was conducted based on the means values of the responses. The literature review resulted in categorizing the factors into five groups, namely, human’s related factors, organizational and managerial, material factor, project-related factors, and the external environment and stakeholders’ factors. This research applied a taxonomy approach to classifying the mean values throughout three ideas, namely, the classification of the major success factors and delays, the exploration of the sub success factors and delays within each significant factor, and last the exploration of the most critical sub success factors and delays regardless of the significant factor they are linked to this group. According to the analyses results, the major success factors were evaluated based on priority ranking, and the results showed that the projects related factors group was the most crucial motive of either success or delays. Still, human-related factors were the least important factors group; however, the “coherent team.” was the most sub factor evaluated. For the organizational and managerial sub-factors, the functional manager support was the most evaluated subfactor. Last, the materials sub-factor of the availability of materials was ranked as the most subfactor evaluated.