Measuring the Impact of Critical Success Factors of Project on Project Success in the Telecom Firms

Measuring the Impact of Critical Success Factors of Project on Project Success in the Telecom Firms

Introduction:

Project success is one of the ambiguous concepts in project management. As each person or group of people who are involved in a project have different needs and expectations from the same project, it is very common that they take project success in their own way, as per their own understanding (Cleland & Ireland, 2004).

Research on project measurement deliverables and focus on the main project management practices (time, cost and quality) shows that it is not possible to have a ubiquitous success criterion that is suitable for all projects. Focus of project management activities differ from one project to another on the basis of a number of attributes like projects uniqueness, business, volume, complexity, customer preferences and the interest of stakeholders. So it is not enough to assume that time, cost and quality are the only success factors of a project but they must be explored and quantified with an overall establishment of a number of multifaceted and unified project evaluation criteria (Ojiako et al., 2008).

The difference between criteria and factors is unclear to many people. The Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary describes a criterion as "a standard by which you judge, decide about or deal with something" while a factor is explained as "a fact or situation which influences the result of something". In this study I have tried to set up a relationship between the project success factors and actual project success variables through literature and an empirical analysis adopted from the research of Andersen et al (2006). Focus would be on the Telecom Sector of Pakistan. This is because all the...

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...nts, 24 per cent were working as Project Mangers, 62 per cent Project Team Member, 14 per cent End User; 84 per cent male, 16 percent female; 73 per cent of the projects were Production or construction oriented, 12 per cent Research and Development oriented, 15 per cent Decision support oriented; 32 per cent working on large projects, 58 per cent medium, 10 percent small.

Analysis and Results

Data is analyzed through SPSS Version 16. As all the questionnaires were self-administered it was established prior to floating the questionnaire that all the respondents should be associated to the project management related activities and should be aware of the concept of Project Success. The validity of the questionnaire has been checked using Cronbach’s alpha test (Results are reported in Table I). Annexure A shows the complete list of questions asked.