M.Ing. / It is of cardinal importance to accept that failure is a fundamental part of every day life. The difference is however, that one does not only need to learn from ones own failures, but also from others’ failures. This is similar to the situation of not working harder, but working smarter. There are several factors within the project environment that can cause a project to fail, but once these factors have been identified the project manager can implement “preventive maintenance” to ensure that these factors do not affect the project. Further investigations on a recently failed project and questionnaires set-up by the author confirm the factors contributing to project failure as discussed in the literature case study. One way to manage these factors is by means of proper project management and risk management, which is a sub-set of project management. This dissertation highlights certain problem areas that can hinder project success and provides recommendations to achieve project success.

M.Ing. (Engineering Management) / Risk and uncertainty are very closely linked; they are recognized as threats arising from unclear causes and effects of the project. Risk and uncertainty management has always been acknowledged as a very important aspect of project management and is mostly used to accomplish project objectives. These objectives are; quality, cost, time, safety and environmental sustainability. A majority of researchers have focused on other characteristics of risks and uncertainty management rather than a comprehensive method which encompasses developing risk management plan, identify, and analyze the likelihood of its occurrence and consequence should it happen. The common challenges still experienced in project environment are; use of improper project management methodology, stake holder interference in the decision making process, complexity of the project, and changing requirements and management. This study seeks to look at how risk and uncertainty can be successfully managed within project environment. Through case studies this research will also look at how does improper risk management plan affect the project, and the consequences of stakeholder interference in the decision making process. The report presents project risk management approach of two projects carried out in the same organisation. The project A was executed by a project manager from the Project Management Office (PMO) in accordance with the project management methodology, while the execution of project B was highly influenced by a client/sponsor with no regard of the approved project management methodology. The selected projects both involved equipment replacement in which the main deliverables are supply and delivery of the final product. A description of the project risk management approach and analysis of data collected for each case study are followed by a comparison of two project risk management processes applied in case studies. This study will finally draw the conclusion and make recommendations based on its findings.

M.Ing. / Housing is the core infrastructure on which all other infrastructure like electricity, roads, water and sanitation depend. The escalation of public demonstrations by communities against the slow delivery and poor quality of housing projects in 2006 indicates that housing is a very sensitive issue that also involves a lot of politics. Most disadvantaged communities in South Africa lack even the most basic infrastructure like water. For any community to function properly and be successful, the core infrastructure must be in place. The core infrastructure consists of housing, roads and storm-water, water and sanitation and electricity and other auxiliary infrastructure include social services, safety and security. Government in South Africa is facing the challenges of delivering on promises and programmes from election campaigns and the mandate of the community. Government set national targets on the delivery of infrastructure services by focussing on water, electricity and sanitation. The national target was set to provide universal access to electricity services by 2012. The housing backlog in South Africa was chosen as a topic for this dissertation because of the many challenges and the variants that the project team comes across with each project. Project management involves managing projects according to specifications, within budget and delivering the end-product on time. Delivering completed housing projects to communities is a very challenging task as demonstrated by the many late or stalled housing projects in municipalities. This dissertation addresses the challenges facing the National Department of Housing as well as municipalities in delivering good quality accommodation to the poor communities.

M.Phil. / The provision of adequate infrastructure and the economic growth of a country's highly interrelated population growth and rapid urbanization has placed enormous pressure on existing infrastructure. The provision of new and maintenance of existing infrastructure presents a challenge to the government. In South Africa infrastructure expenditure were generally funded directly from the country's fiscal budgets. Macroeconomic instability and growing investment requirements have shown that public financing is too volatile and rarely meets crucial infrastructure expenditure requirements in a timely and adequate manner. On the other hand, private sector organisations have a larger pool of sources from which to seek funding, equity investors, capital markets, banks etc., this can be from local to international markets. Therefore, private sector involvement in infrastructure provision has been widely used as a preferred method of financing these projects. The South African government can no longer carry the financial burden in it's fiscal policy to finance all the infrastructure projects needed in this country, and it is also up to the private sector to seek funding for projects that will be economical strong enough to service its own debt. Research objectivesobjectives of this study are to give a background of project financing by addressing the risks involved, finance structures, funding alternatives and strategies.

Since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, New York in September 2001, the focus on terrorism and the ability of society and organisations to withstand such incidents has sharpened considerably. At the same time, business continuity and dealing with crises have moved to the forefront of organisations' awareness, not least due to improved regulatory requirements and guidelines. However, this thesis contends that the current methodological framework for responding to terrorist incidents is flawed, resulting in the same issues becoming evident, over and over again. It is argued that an awareness and adoption of three key risk and crisis management methodologies: Fink's Crisis Management Methodology, Risk Communication and Isomorphic Learning, could improve the analysis of such incidents and hence better the response in future. Three significant terrorist attacks were analysed within the context of contemporary literature and two factors were found to be the main cause of difficulties in managing the response to each of the incidents: communication and an inability to achieve organisational learning. It was argued that part of the reason for this was that organisations did not consider a link between crisis and terrorist incident response management and that learning from past experiences did not go beyond the most superficial level in most instances. This thesis demonstrated how risk and crisis management methodologies could have addressed each of the issues that were identified in the case studies and clarified the contribution that they could make. Of primary importance was the recognition that events that may appear dissimilar are, on examination, frequently intrinsically similar and hence can provide valuable learning opportunities.

Construction Project Procurement Methods (PMs) define the roles, relationships and responsibilities of project team members and the sequence of the activities required to construct or provide a facility. A number of different PMs have evolved over the years, but each is characterised by a different set of features upon which the criteria for selecting the most appropriate method to procure a given project must be based, if successful project performance (PP) is to be ensured. The use of procurement method selection criteria (PMSC) to inform clients’ decision on suitable PMs to adopt remains a recommended good practice in the construction industry. However, project clients in the Libya Construction Industry (LCI), continue to face great challenges when it comes to selecting the most appropriate PM for its projects. The general practice in this industry is largely dominated by a culture of clients’ reliance on their familiarity and experience with a particular method to inform their PM choice, with no consideration of the plethora of other PMs and use of rational approaches to aid in this decision-making. This procurement issue has long been recognised as a major contributory factor to the frequent time and cost overruns often experienced by projects in the LCI. Although the selection of an appropriate PM to procure any given project is known to result in success PP and (and vice versa), very little is known about the nature of this relationship from literature. Having persistently suffered a great deal of project failures over the years, the LCI stands to benefit from detailed knowledge and understanding of how exactly PM choice do actually influence PP. Stimulated by the dearth of this information, this thesis reports on a research investigation into this relationship with the aim of developing a model to explain the criteria functions in contributing to PP and their implications to PM selection practice in Libya. The methodological approach adopted for this research was the mixed method, i.e., using a combination of both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Following a critical review of the extant relevant literature, a number of relevant hypotheses were first formulated, together with a conceptual framework, to establish the theoretical basis underpinning this research, namely the relationship between the selection of PMs (based on PMSC) and PP. The primary data collection stage involved an initial field questionnaire survey aimed at identifying and confirming the key areas of the research inquiry that needs focusing on. This was followed by a semi-structured questionnaire and interview surveys. With the aid of SPSS and Excel, the collected data were analysed, followed by the development of a mathematical model (based on regression) that demonstrate the influence of PMSC on PP. Finally, the model was validated by expert interviews to test for its validity and reliability. The key findings of the research include the identification of DBB and DB selection criteria that contributes to PP. The distinct contribution to knowledge arising from this research includes the development of a regression model to demonstrate this relationship between PMSC and PP. The benefit of these outputs lies not only in the ability of LCI’s clients to make PM selection decisions much faster by virtue of the need for them to only focus on the criteria with significant influence on PP, they are also able to work out, in quantitative terms, the PP outcomes to be expected for each of the method being considered. This latter information would enable clients to compare the PP outcome values expected from their decisions to select DBB and DB, and then be able to conclude which of these two options represents a better procurement strategy for any given project at hand.

Increased globalised competition and the need to meet continuously changing customer requirements has forced the UK construction industry to consider its practice. The industry has been repeatedly criticised for its inefficiency, fragmentation, profitability, and lack of co-ordination and communication by many governmental and institutional reports (Phillips, 1950; Emmerson, 1962; Banwell, 1964; Gyles, 1992; Latham, 1994; Egan, 1998). Latham and Egan cited that process improvement and learning from the manufacturing industry could aid the prevailing situation. Following such recommendations, a number of construction clients started developing their own design and construction process, including BAA (British Airports Authority), BAe (British Aerospace) and London Underground, as a way to improve the prevailing situation. An appraisal of these industrial approaches highlighted a common structure that contributed to the development of the Generic Design and Construction Process Protocol (GDCPP). This research project, led by the University of Salford, proved to be the impetus for a flurry of other construction companies to remodel their processes. However, the success of a construction project is not always directly attributed to the performance of the new project process, and vice versa. Framed in these terms, how can the effectiveness of implementing a new design and construction project process be measured in recompense to this growing trend of process improvement? Construction performance measurement today is myopic. For too long, construction organisations have focused on short-termism. If they are to remain competitive, they need to embrace broader issues other than the traditional time cost and quality metrics of construction performance (Love & Holt, 2000). They must also consider the performance of the project process itself (Neely et al, 2000) as to determine the true barriers to success, be that the process itself or implementation factors. However, there is at present a lack of understanding on how the measurement of project processes should be approached. This is attributable in part to the absence of publicly available information, and in part to the inherent difficulty of measuring a complex and creative process. This thesis describes the development of the project process evaluation (PPE) framework that aims to address this research gap. Literature reviews and a scoping survey questionnaire were used in this research investigation for the discovery and building of the PPE framework. The framework consists of five steps, which guides the user from the identification of performance indicators governing the selection of the new project process, through into a knowledge-learning domain in order to improve upon future projects. A case study research strategy was then used to test and validate the model, which employed various research methods to collect both qualitative and quantitative data for the study; the Process Protocol was deployed on the case studies in order to certify the framework. The resulting PPE framework provides an original, prototypical solution to assessing the effectiveness of implementing a new design and construction project process.

The objective of this study was to investigate IT projects within the Swedish public sector. Furthermore we have looked at the project closure in IT projects. The problem that occurs in this topic is that the projects can run overtime or over budget. In this research we used interviews to conduct the data collection. We have collected data from two public sector organizations – Jönköpings kommun and Domstolsverket, both of these orginzations have a dedicated IT department. Through the methods, theoretical framework and analysis we found many different activities and theories on how to handle project closure in IT. The main subjects that keep coming up when addressing the problems of project closure are communication and planning. The responsibilities of the project manager are investigated and the focus is on closing an IT project. A descriptive diagram has been created to show what is important during and before project closure

M.Tech. / In the volatile telecommunication industry, innovation is the key to success. Mobile Telephone Network South Africa (MTN SA) needs to launch new products and services consistently to stay on the competitive edge. Consequently, effective project management becomes the key to gaining the competitive advantage by turning new product or service concepts into reality. According to Nokes and Kelly (2007:153–156), there is a high correlation between project success and effective project scope management. The effectiveness of project scope management can drastically affect the success of projects, as changes to the project scope may severely affect the project value creation, timeline, quality and cost. Accordingly, high project scope management maturity would contribute tremendously to the effectiveness of project management. The purpose of this present research is to define a roadmap to guide MTN’s Business Optimisation (BO) department to project scope management excellence. To meet this aim, the researcher utilises the concept of a Project Management Maturity Model (PMMM), as a guideline for the creation of a project scope management maturity model. The created project scope management maturity model is then utilised to provide an effective means to measure MTN SA’s project scope management maturity and identify the gaps prohibiting MTN SA from project scope excellence (Kerzner, 2004:193). Based on the literature review on the elements of project scope excellence, this paper suggests that there is a general misunderstanding regarding the definition of maturity. Many believe that process rigorousness indicates maturity, and have forgotten the criticality of the organisational culture that fosters an environment for project scope excellence and the effective use of the project scope process. iii This research offers a comparative study on the most popular and effective maturity models in the market, to identify the models that truly contribute to project scope management success and excellence. Finally, the research tailors the models to a project scope management focused maturity model, to assess MTN SA’s project scope management maturity from all aspects, and proposes a roadmap toward project scope management excellence.

In a fiercely competitive and changing environment most companies employ project management as a strategic tool to respond to the changing business environment and to outperform their competitors, yet the project management maturity level and the Project Success rates for the particular company is not always known. The main objective of this research was to determine whether a higher project management maturity level would go hand in hand with a higher project performance level. To assist in the project management maturity assessment of organisations in South Africa, a shortened version of Harold Kerzner’s project management maturity model was used in the empirical research. Regression analysis was used to determine the correlation between the maturity level and actual project performance of the surveyed organisations. Non-empirical research into the fields of Project Management Benchmarking, Project Management Maturity and Project Success were used to motivate the findings of the empirical research. Whilst conducting the empirical research, assessment and analysis, it was identified that most organisations operate at different project management maturity levels and that there is a relatively strong correlation between the maturity level and Project Success. The analysis of the data indicated that a significant opportunity exists to improve project management maturity within South African organisations and a number of recommendations were made in that regard. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted