The impact of covid-19 on projects in the UAE

Abstract

The covid-19 pandemic has been the biggest worldwide health crisis in decades. Apart from unprecedented number of hospitalizations and deaths, the pandemic has led to in the financial and economic downturns and business disruptions. The current will aim to establish the implications of the covid-19 pandemic on the projects in the UAE. The main objective of the research will be to identify the challenges facing the UAE projects and determine the success of risk management. In addition to that, the research will focus on identifying the most impacted project knowledge areas by the pandemic and the effectiveness of government support to help the business sustain the success of their projects. The research will also address the strategies followed by project managers to recover the delay of projects caused by the pandemic. The descriptive research design and deductive approach will be adopted for the study. Simple random sampling method and purposive sampling method will be applied in the selection of respondents for quantitative and qualitative data, respectively. A total of 50 project managers and 5 senior project managers working in the UAE will be sample for the survey and interview method, respectively. Survey and interview data will be collected will be using the close-ended online and open-ended questionnaire, respectively. It is expected that the research will find a significant impact of covid-19 pandemic on the number of days to complete the projects in the UAE. The finding will also reveal that the pandemic has resulted in inadequate access to labor and raw materials, thereby resulting in delay of the business projects. The implications of this research would inform the decision and policy-makers in the UAE to employ efficient ways of addressing the issues and challenges for the stability of the sector.