Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology
Abstract
The construction of mass housing has become a very important policy in the government of Ghanas efforts at reducing the countrys housing deficit. Unlike traditional one-off building projects, Mass Housing Projects (MHPs) typically present a plethora of asynchronous and synchronous communication among project team members. The efficiency and effectiveness of these communications can be very critical to the successful delivery of the project within cost and time limits. The uniqueness and overall importance of MHPs also presents project managers with communication management challenges which are a clear departure from those associated with traditional one-off construction projects. In this paper, project team communication challenges associated with MHPs in Ghana are critically explored. This would form the basis for recommending practical measures and avenues to improve quality of project team communication on MHPs. By adopting a survey approach, data was collected via structured questionnaire administered to sixty-three MHP team members across the country and analysed using mean score index. Both synchronous and asynchronous forms of communications were found to be employed by project team members with face-to-face meetings and discussions, telephone calls, e-mails and text messaging being the most frequently used media. Aside the common communication challenges such as timeliness of required information, distortion and overload, this paper also identified difficulties relating to access to information as well as challenges regarding dissemination procedures and protocols as key challenges faced by MHP team members
