Professional Association of Project Managers

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CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS FOR THE CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY1
Zakari Tsiga2, Michael Emes, Alan Smith
University College London, Mullard Space Science Laboratory, UK.
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.
Keywords: Construction Projects; Critical Success Factors; Project Risk Management;
Project Success; Requirements Management.
JEL codes: D20, L10, M19
Introduction
The Construction industry is one of the main sectors of the economy; it consists of the
entire process from project visualization to demolition of buildings and infrastructure. As a
service industry it is interlinked with various industries. The importance of the construction
industry can be seen throughout history and in the development of economies. According
to the World Market Intelligence (2010) the construction industry employs more people than
any other single industry in the world. The report by Global Construction Perspectives and
Oxford Economics (2013) suggest that the sector is globally expected to rise by $6.3 trillion
or over 70 % to $15 trillion by 2025 compared to $8.7 trillion in 2012. 
The construction
1 Second Editions are previously published papers that have continued relevance in today’s project management
world, or which were originally published in conference proceedings or in a language other than English. Original
publication acknowledged; authors retain copyright. This paper was originally presented at the 5th Scientific
Conference on Project Management in the Baltic States, University of Latvia, April 2016. It is republished here with
the permission of the author and conference organizers
2
Corresponding author: Zakari Tsiga, E-mail address: zakari.tsiga.13@ucl.ac.uk.

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industry incorporates all civil engineering projects such as building projects as well as the
maintenance and repair of existing constructed projects.
As the industry is constantly growing, newer and bigger projects are always undertaken
(Chan & Chan, 2004). These new undertakings generally come with more complexities as
boundaries are being pushed. An example of such large project currently being undertaking
is the Saadiyat Island project in Abu Dhabi, UAE with an estimated budget cost of $26
billion (Ponzini, 2011).
Project success is the end deliverable of every undertaken project. Project success has
been a subject of debate (Alexandrova & Ivanova, 2012). In the construction sector various
efforts have been taken in other to determine these project success criteria because
different stakeholders have different views and perception of a project this in itself can lead
to various views on project success.
1. Background
1.1 Project Success
In the past, research on project success focused on the achievement of the iron triangle
objectives (time, cost and quality) until recently researchers have identified the need to
widen the criteria for measuring project success (Atkinson, 1999; Wateridge, 1998).
Researchers such as de Wit (1988) emphasize that a project is considered successful if its
stakeholders are generally successful and the projects technical performance specification
has been achieved. Muller (2007) states that projects differ in a variety of ways such as
size, uniqueness and complexity this has lead researchers such as Westerveld (2003) to
state that the criteria for measuring project success should vary from project to project and
hence it would be difficult to have a unique set of criteria for all projects in all industries.
1.2 Critical Success Factors
The identification and careful consideration of critical success factors can have a positive
outcome on a project. New participants in the construction industry and also established
companies can use these factors to easily help themselves in better project delivery for
future projects (Bullen & Rockart, 1981).
Rockart (1982) define critical success factors as “those key areas of activity in which
favorable results are absolutely necessary for a manager to reach his/her goals”.
Researcher such as Futrell et al (2001) agree with the above stated definition as they
believe critical success factors are those factors in a project that can lead to a positive
achievement of stakeholder expectations and requirements. Boynton & Zmud (1984) goes
to the extent of stating that the achievement of CSFs in projects ensures positive outcome.
Critical success factors have been used in a wide variety of projects in different sectors
such as information technology (Almajed & Mayhew, 2014), Petroleum (Tsiga et al., 2016 ),
Space (Tsiga et al., 2016) as well as for generic projects (Muller & Jugdev, 2012; Pinto &
Prescott, 1988). A review of the literature by Tsiga et al. (2016) identified the critical
success factors and their corresponding categories as shown in Table 1.

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Table 1
Critical success factors and categories
Category Critical Success Factors Sources
External
Challenge
Economic environment, social environment,
political environment, physical environment
and regulatory/legal environment.
(Gudiene et al., 2014);
(Omran et al., 2012);
(Tan & Ghazali, 2011)
Client
knowledge
and
experience
Nature of finance, experience, organization
size, emphasis on cots quality and time, ability
to brief, decision making, roles and
contribution, expectations and commitment,
involvement and influence.
(Gudiene et al., 2014);

Top
management
support
Support given to project head, support to
critical activities, understanding of project
difficulty and stakeholder influence.
(Ram & Corkindale,
2014); (Varajao et al.,
2014); (Almajed &
Mayhew, 2014).

factors
Project
characteristics
Project type, size, nature, complexity, design,
resources allocation time and level of
technology.
(Yong & Mustaffa, 2013);
(Omran et al., 2012).
Project
manager
competence
Experience, coordinating and motivating skills,
leading skills, communication and feedback,
management skills, conflict resolution skills
and organizing skills.
(Toor & Ogunlana, 2009);
(Malach-Pines et al.,
2009); (Barclay & OseiBryson, 2009).
Project
organization
Planning and control effort, team structure and
integration, safety and quality program,
schedule and work definition, budgeting and
control of subcontractors.
(Gudiene et al., 2014);
(Varajao et al., 2014);
(Berssaneti & Carvalho,
2015).
Contractual
aspects
Contract type, tendering (procedures or steps
for the selection of that service) and
procurement (company selection to provide
services) process.
(Yong & Mustaffa, 2013);
(Omran et al., 2012);
(Tan & Ghazali, 2011);
(Chan et al., 2004).
Project team
competence
Team experience, technical skills, planning
and organizing skills, commitment and
involvement, teams adaptability to changing
requirements, working relationships,
educational level, training availability and
decision making effectiveness.
(Gudiene et al., 2014);
(Varajao et al., 2014);
(Almajed & Mayhew,
2014); (Ram &
Corkindale, 2014).
Project Risk
Management
The factors under project risk management
are sub divided into two which are firstly hard
aspects with initiation, identification,
assessment, response planning, response
implementation and secondly, soft aspects of
risk, which are risk communication and
attitude, monitoring and review
(Almajed & Mayhew,
2014), (Rabechini Junior
& Monteiro de Carvalho,
2013), (Didraga, 2013),
Requirements
Management
Elicitation technique, identification, analysis
and negotiation, modelling, validation and
scope management
(Mirza et al., 2013)
(Didraga, 2013)

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Source: (Tsiga et al., 2016)
2. Methods
There has already been some research performed on projects in the construction industry.
The first step taken in this research was to examine the already established CSFs from
literature and previous work. Projects such as the London Olympic Park (Davies &
Mackenzie, 2013) and the Sydney Opera House (Colbert, 2003) were carefully analysed
before a standard set of factors was obtained. The factors gotten where then categorised
into 11.
Another strategy implemented in this research was to develop the questionnaire using the
key categories and factors identified and test them by asking professionals working in the
industry to provide us with their views. The implementation of the technique allowed the
authors to be able to analyse and quantify the data gotten from the respondents.
The data was analysed using the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) software to
perform test such as the hypothesis test would be discussed in section 4.
2.1 Questionnaire Design
The survey consisted of 37 questions, which were then grouped into 5 different sections.
The first section contained background information of the respondents such as experience
and qualification. The next section had 11 questions that the respondents ranked based on
a 10-point scale. The third and fourth sections asked respondents to rank factors of project
risk management and requirements management also using the 10 point scale and the final
section consisted of only two questions aimed at asking respondents details of they wanted
to be contacted for further research and discussions.
After the questionnaire was designed before being distributed, a small pilot test was
conducted with potential participants to get feedback on possible improvements. The
recommendations gotten from the test was implemented to the design before final
distribution.
2.2 Study Sample
The study was distributed online via email and business oriented social networking sites
LinkedIn, as such the participants are geographically located in different parts of the world
with diverse project experience in the construction industry. The total number of completed
and valid responses are obtained from the survey was 49.
Most respondents are currently project managers with master’s degrees, have an average
of more than 15 years’ project experience and also more than 15 years’ project
management experience.
They have participated in more than 15 projects with an average value of order of
magnitude 100 million $/€/£, delivering service projects and other categories of projects;
they are mostly geographically located in the United Kingdom, United States of America,
Nigeria, Australia and Canada.

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3. Data Analysis and Findings
3.1 Relative Importance index
Relative importance index has been implemented in this study with the aim of it providing a
better understanding of individual predictors and their individual role amongst a given set
(Tonidandel & LeBreton, 2011). This method has been implemented in various project
management literature such as (Gudiene et al., 2013; Iyer & Jha, 2006). The formula for
the calculation is shown below:

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