Assessment of Critical Success Factors in Construction Projects Performance in South West Ethiopia

Construction industry plays fundamental role in increasing the economy of many countries. It accounts about 13% of global economy and serves as key driver for other industries. The basic problem of any company is to complete the projects with specified time, cost, scope and quality. The project failure rate according to World Bank was over 50% in Africa. Ethiopia is one of the developing countries which cannot accomplish its construction industry goals due to lack of identifying critical success factors. Therefore the objective of the study is to assess critical success factors in construction projects of south west Ethiopia. The data was collected from secondary and primary data. This research adopted both qualitative and quantitative research and 103 questionnaires were used in 30 construction projects. There are 81 success factors which were identified from literatures. From 81 success factors, decision making effectiveness (MIS=4.41), project monitoring (MIS=4.41),control mechanism(MIS=4.33), prior project management (MIS=4.32), project manager adaptability to changes project plan (MIS=4.23), site management (MIS=4.23),supervision (MIS=4.23),organizing skills of project manager (MIS=4.23), communication system (MIS=4.23) and project manager authority to take financial decision (MIS=4.21) were the top ten ranked critical success factors. From these 60% of the critical success factors were originated from project management related and 30% were from contractor related factors. Therefore it is recommended that any construction parties should revise their construction management mechanisms and the project owners should evaluate in depth the capability and capacity of their contractors during bidding process before they awarded the project to the contractors. Keywords: success, construction industry, success factors, critical success factors DOI: 10.7176/CER/13-6-01 Publication date:September 30th 202