Identifying success criteria at the post-handover stage for international development projects

The question of how successful a project is beyond the handover stage is still echoing in the literature on project management and more magnified in international development (ID) projects. In addressing the question, this study aims to demonstrate the importance of time frame in assessing project success, particularly identifying the success criteria at the post-handover stages (outcome and impact stages). This study used a qualitative approach that was rooted in interpretivism, allowing the use of constructivist grounded theory method (CGTM) in an ID project as an example. The study identified eight success criteria: Convenience, Development, Documentation, Maintainability, New Capability, Price of Service or Product, Training, and Usability. The study also found that, first, each participant had different emphases on different success criteria; second, most of the identified success criteria were still under the outcome stage; and lastly, usability received the highest responses from the participants as the most concerned criterion at the post-handover stages. This last finding verified the importance of time frame where the other criteria became less important if the outputs were useful to deliver the institutions’ strategic objectives. Future studies that use more sampled participants and different types of institutions are also encouraged

Balancing private investment and community expectations in public-private-partnership projects : a novel approach for evaluating long-term value

Balancing private investment and community expectations is always crucial in social Public-private-Partnership (PPP) projects, such as schools, public housing, and hospitals. Evaluating the value of such PPPs requires the governments to accurately assess costs, risks, and benefits through their Public Sector Comparator (PSC). The Public Sector Comparator (PSC) focuses on the economic benefits and tangible value offered by bidders, such as whole-of-life financing costs, capital costs, operation, maintenance costs, and risk allocation as proposed by the government. Non-monetized benefits, which are vital during the delivery of social infrastructure, are typically evaluated heuristically by comparing specific solutions proposed by bidders. However, assessing uncertainties in government requirements and materialized risks when comparing a bid to Public Sector Comparator (PSC) using discounted cost techniques at a specific point in time is challenging. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel approach for evaluating investments that considers non-monetary benefits over a PPP project’s life cycle, based on the risks and benefits seen in recent social PPP projects. Engineering reliability analysis is preferred in this study to emphasize the performance reliability of investment decisions. The proposed reliability-based evaluation considers not only cost uncertainty and non-monetary benefits based on project observations but allows for time-based decision-making by being used at multiple points in time, to be incorporated into the original investment decision. Future case study is expected to demonstrate that the proposed approach allows for predicting long-term value by using a performance reliability index to measure the robustness of the original investment assumptions such as demand projections and future sustainability outcomes