Perceptions of stakeholders on the critical success factors for operational management of public-private partnership projects

Purpose: This paper aims to explore the perceptual differences on the factors that contribute to the successful management of public-private partnership (PPP) projects at the operational stage among stakeholders. Design/methodology/approach: An international questionnaire survey was conducted with purposively sampled PPP experts from the private, public and academic sectors. Survey responses were analyzed using Kendall’s coefficient of concordance (W), mean score ranking analysis, Kruskal–Wallis test and Mann–Whitney U test. Findings: The research findings show that each stakeholder group considers an efficient and well-structured payment mechanism as the most important operational management critical success factor (CSF). Moreover, the public sector considers open and constant communication among stakeholders as the second most important CSF, whereas the private and academic sectors consider effective operational risk management and well-structured legal dispute resolution mechanism, respectively. Further analysis using non-parametric tests (i.e. Kruskal–Wallis and Mann–Whitney U statistics) reveal significant differences in the importance of three operational management CSFs – “open and constant communication among stakeholders”, “effective changes of shareholdings in private consortium” and “stable macroeconomic indicators”. Research limitations/implications: The generalizability of the research findings is limited considering the low sample size and non-participation of users/general public in the study. Hence, it is recommended that future research should be conducted in a specific country using both face-to-face and email questionnaire distribution approaches. This would likely increase the response rate and facilitate the inclusion of the general public/users. Originality/value: The results of this study highlight and provide significant insights into how different PPP stakeholders perceive the critical conditions that are required to ensure the operational efficiency of PPP projects. This would, therefore, enable a better cooperation and collective effort from all stakeholders towards achieving the overall project success. In addition, the study offers new and additional CSFs which would enhance the comprehensiveness of the existing list of CSFs for the general implementation of PPP projects