Relationship between Project Consultants’ Performance and Project Success in the Rwandan Construction Industry

Abstract

As discovered, today’s Rwandan construction industry is developing day by day, which plays a very important role in the country’s economic growth. In the construction industry, project consultants play a very significant role in providing services for such projects. The project consultants provide services from the beginning of the project to the completion of the project. Using project consultants is very useful for construction projects because it can ameliorate project efficiency and effectiveness. The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between project consultants’ performance and project success in the Rwandan construction industry. The data used in this study were obtained from primary and secondary sources. The secondary data was attained through an elaborated literature review of various books, articles, and papers related to this research to outlining and describing the chief ideas of this research title. The primary data was compiled through a questionnaire survey that was directed to 110 selected professionals in the construction projects in Rwanda to collect data from the site for statistical analysis of the research to test the hypothesis. However, a total of 90 usable responses were received within the scheduled period representing the response rate of 81.82%, which is likely to be representative and acceptable. Data collected from the questionnaire surveys were analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Scientists (SPSS), excel spreadsheets, and Relative Importance Index (RII), which provide more merit presentations. The survey results show that even if there are many obstacles in the use of project consultants in the Rwandan construction industry such as lack of knowledge and practice in project consulting, lack of well-trained project consulting professionals, lack of training opportunities in project consulting, lack of knowledge and experience in addition to the senior management opposition, and lack of local project consulting guidelines and information; they are needed in the construction project to make it more successful through reducing and saving the overall project’s life cycle cost according to client’s wishes, keeping time of construction project, improving quality of the project products in the present and future, removing major variations that affect construction project with its attendant cost overrun, and advising on construction project process. Therefore, it is more important to remark that the good performance of the project consultants in any industry especially in the construction industry will contribute to the successful implementation of the project. From the results of the study, the performance of project consultants is closely related to the success of the construction industry in Rwanda. The project consultants’ leading skills and knowledge automatically guide the project to complete with accurate time, budget, and quality to make the project successful. In this paper, we will also consider the project success criteria; the role and responsibility of project consultants; the factors affecting the performance of project consultants; and the reasons that hinder the implementation of project consulting in the Rwandan construction industry.