A wide variety of tools exists for appraisal in general. There are, however, very few widely accepted guidelines governing their specific application in industrial projects. It would be useful to a practicing project appraiser to be able to discern which appraisal methods are most applicable to a particular situation. This research has therefore undertaken to investigate the relationship between the appraisal methods available and their application to industrial projects. As such, a number of specific objectives have been discerned. The first of these was to analyse the literature in order to determine the general views held. The second was to corroborate the views of literature with actual industrial trends. The final objective was to compare theory and practice in order to develop broad guidelines for future project appraisers. The procedure adopted to meet these objectives firstly involved conducting a survey of the literature. This yielded a number of conclusions which suggest a preferred approach to appraisal. To evaluate this approach an appropriate questionnaire was compiled. This questionnaire was then circulated to a representative target area, namely the industrial sector of the South Western Cape. The response to this survey provided a database of actual industrial projects. From this database trends were extracted using a number of statistical techniques, such as Analysis of Variance, Contingency Analysis and Log-linear Modelling. The results of this analysis were then used to complement the conclusions of literature and to confirm the preferred approach to project appraisal. The conclusions from the literature where consensus was found to exist involve the following issues: The chronological position of appraisal in the project life-cycle. The types of study that should be included in project appraisal. The chronological order of these studies. The extent to which formal techniques should be used. The background that the appraisers should have. The extent to which project characteristics influence the appraisal approach. The database provided by the industrial survey consisted of 173 projects conducted in 33 different organisations. Analysis conducted on this database yielded a number of simple one-to-one relationships between project success, appraisal method used and project characteristics. From these relationships a picture of the reality experienced in the South Western Cape could be formed. Such a picture was compared with literature in order to form an overall set of guidelines for use by the practising project appraiser. As a result of the analysis and the subsequent comparison between literature and practice, conclusions were drawn concerning a number of aspects in the research. Such aspects include the success of the research method, uncertainties of the industrial survey, consensus between literature and practice on appraisal procedures and the existence of a preferred approach to project appraisal. A number of recommendations could also be made with regard to two areas of interest. The first concerns recommendations for further research in the field of project appraisal. These include extending the database so as to accommodate multi-variate analysis, researching the formal techniques available for operational suitability and technical feasibility studies and adopting a different mode of survey to that of a posted questionnaire. The second area of interest recommends a set of broad guidelines to the practising project appraiser. These guidelines rationalise such issues as the influence of project characteristics on the use of appraisal methods, the chronological position of appraisal within the project life-cycle, the type and chronological order of studies that should be conducted in the appraisal procedure and the techniques and expertise that should be utilised within each study.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:uct/oai:localhost:11427/17306 |
| Date | January 1990 |
| Creators | Möller, Ian Robert |
| Contributors | McGeorge, J F, Lister, Gordon |
| Publisher | University of Cape Town, Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, Department of Construction Economics and Management |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Master Thesis, Masters, MSc (Eng) |
| Format | application/pdf |
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