Building Contract Performance: A Case Study Of Government Projects In Kenya

Abstract

The success of any project is determined mainly by the effectiveness of the procedure used and by the efficiency of the organizational tools employed. Building and construction projects in general are particularly very sensitive to the nature of the organizational structure of the implementation team. This is so because many different, autonomous and fragmented institutions are brought together to combine their various expertise with a comon objective of producing a structure to the satisfaction of the client. It is the efficiency of combining their various activities that generally determines the success of the project. In Kenya, many reports have continued to appear in the local newspapers, professional journals and even meetings have been held by the respective institutions on accusations and counter accusations on the performance of government building contracts. The concern has been raised by a few cases of delayed projects which are likely be the tip of the iceberg, because nobody has come up with an emperical data to prove their side of the argument. Among other methods of measuring contract performance are cost and time, the success which contributes to yet another measure-client satisfaction The aim of this study is to establish whether or not the performance of government building contracts in terms of cost and time was poor in the period 1967 - 1981.~ This is done by use of a statistical technique - regression and correlation analysis as programmed in Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS)• It is shown that majority of government building contracts suffer cost and time overruns. Time overruns are more frequent than cost overruns and the two are not related. Big projects have been shown to be more prone to both time and cost overruns than the smaller ones although delays have been found to bear no relationship to contract sizes.