The Need for a Change in the Practice of Project Management in Kenya
Gwaya Abednego1, Wanyona Githae2, Masu Sylvester Munguti3
1Gwaya Abednego , Lecturer- Construction Management, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) NAIROBI, KENYA.
2Wanyona Githae, Senior Lecturer- Construction Management, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) NAIROBI, KENYA
3Sylvester Munguti Masu, Senior Lecturer- Real Estate and Construction Management, University of Nairobi (UON), NAIROBI, KENYA.
Manuscript received on December 08, 2014. | Revised Manuscript received on December 15, 2014. | Manuscript published on January 05, 2014. | PP: 24-29| Volume-3 Issue-6, January 2014. | Retrieval Number: E1909113513/2014©BEIESP
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© The Authors. Published By: Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering and Sciences Publication (BEIESP). This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)
Abstract: Several countries at various levels of socio-economic development have recognized the need and importance of taking measures to improve the performance of their construction industries. One of the means to this end has been to ensure performance efficiency in construction projects execution. As has been widely acknowledged, this requires a deliberate process of continuously monitoring the performance of projects based on relevant indicators. Many project management models have been proposed in literature which measure projects performance under the broad headings of critical success factors and key performance indicators. However, these objectives are faced with several drawbacks. These have to do with the difficulty in developing a realistic and agreed set of indicators due to the very nature of the industry; the number of indicators necessary to give a complete picture and offer relevance and accuracy to the overall result will be very large; the difficulty in collecting and processing the required raw data for estimating the indicators, especially in developing countries; and the need to amend or adapt these criteria and indicators for each country. At the core of these problems is the fact that most of the existing models emphasize the use of lagging measures instead of leading measures. Worse, they do not emphasize continuous assessment of the project, and finally, these models do not pay attention to needs of the clients as initiators of the project. It also takes into consideration the particular circumstances of the project. In addressing the problems, it is necessary to reconfigure project management in the following regards: (i) Moving away from expecting “project autopsy reports” towards “project health reports” (ii) Moving away from considering the outcomes of a project in terms of success/failure dichotomy into project performance results in identifiable criteria (iii) Acknowledging the uniqueness of every project and the contingency factors which calls for contingency measures of assessment.
Keywords: Project management, modelling, leading measures and lagging measure