Critical success factors for the construction industry

Abstract

This study aims to identify the critical success factors for projects in the construction industry. A list of factors were identified from the existing literature and grouped into categories. The authors added project risk management and requirements management to the list of categories to test the hypothesis that these should also be considered as critical success factors in the construction industry. The study identified 58 success factors classified into 11 groups, which were tested using an elicitation technique. Forty-nine responses were collected from project managers, who had an average or 15 years of project management experience and had participated in more than 15 projects. Once the data was collected, the authors adopted the use of the relative importance index to rank the categories. From the results, the top five most important are (1) Project Organization, (2) Project Manager Competence, (3) Project Risk Management, (4) Project Team Competence and (5) Requirements Management. This lead to the conclusion that both project risk management and requirements management should be considered as critical success factors. Further analysis of the data highlights the importance of scope management and soft skills in Requirements Management and Project Risk Management respectively