Project Planning and Performance of Urban Road Projects in Kenya

Abstract

Construction industry has complexity in its nature because it contains large number of parties as clients, contractors, consultants, stakeholders, shareholders and regulators. The total annual cost of worldwide project failures alone is $7.5 trillion dollars. A report from the Ministry of Roads and Infrastructure identified eight main reasons for the failure of government projects. These included inadequate planning; insufficient buy-in by senior management; failure to engage effectively with key stakeholders; a lack of technical skills; poor project monitoring and review; inadequate initial evaluation of the project; poor networking skills; and failure to integrate the disparate parties needed to deliver project success. Hence, this study examined the relationship between project planning and performance of urban road projects in Kenya. Specifically, the study focused on project design, scope planning, project cost planning, and project risk management planning as the independent variables. The moderating effect of road construction policy on project planning and the performance of urban road projects in Kenya was examined. The study adopted the project management theory, systems theory, queuing theory, resource-based view theory, fuzzy set theory, and incremental theory. The study adopted descriptive survey research design and positivism research philosophy while its target population included 34 urban road projects in Kenya and 408 Construction registered professionals within the urban road projects. Census sampling was used to select all the 34 urban road projects whereas Yamane’s sample size determination formula and stratified random sampling method were applied to arrive at a sample size of 202 professionals from the urban road projects. The unit of analysis was the urban road projects whereas the unit of analysis was the construction professionals. Primary data was collected through the administration of questionnaires to the sampled professionals in the urban road projects. A pilot study was conducted to establish the reliability and validity of the questionnaires. For reliability, the questionnaire had a Cronbach Alpha value of 0.944. In this study, quantitative data was analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. Descriptive statistics were summarized into percentages, means and standard deviation. Data was processed using SPSS version 25 and the results presented using graphs and tables. Inferential analysis was done using the correlation and linear regression analysis. The study revealed that separately and when combined with other variables, project design, scope planning, project cost planning, and project risk management planning had a positive and statistically significant effect on the performance of urban road projects in Kenya. Results also indicated that road construction policy had a positively significant moderating effect on the relationship between project planning and performance of urban road projects in Kenya. The study concluded that project design, scope planning, project cost planning, and project risk management planning had a positive and significant effect on performance of urban road projects in Kenya. The study recommended that construction firms should invest in specialized training and tools to improve model development, optimization, and visualization for more efficient and accurate project planning. Additionally, they should adopt modern construction technologies such as Building Information Modeling (BIM) and project management software to enhance integration and coordination across all phases of project design.