Influence of stakeholders involvement on project outcome: a case of Kigumo girls academic centre of excellence project, Murang’a county

Abstract

Project managers are always looking forward to seeing public projects perform well. This involves finishing the project on time, within budget, meeting end product specifications, meeting customer needs and requirements and meeting management objectives. Despite the quest for project success, many poverty eradication projects in Kenya have continuously experienced time overrun, budget overrun, unmet end product specifications, unmet customer needs and requirements and unmet management objectives (Auditor general’s report, 2008). The high failure rate in these projects could be due to failure to involve key stakeholders in project activities. Various studies elsewhere have been conducted in evaluating stakeholders’ involvement in project outcome but there is no study done about Kigumo Girls Academic Centre of Excellence project despite it facing many challenges related to timelines and cost based challenges. The purpose of this study was to evaluate stakeholders’ involvement in project outcome through gathering and analyzing the information on the level of involvement of stakeholders in the process of project cycle management (PCM). The study sought to assess stakeholders involvement in project identification, project planning, project execution and project review on project outcome. This study employed descriptive survey design. The target population for this study was the various stakeholders in the ESP programme precisely Kigumo girls Centre of Excellence project in Kigumo constituency. Data was collected from a sample of 418 respondents. The primary data was collected from the community members using a semistructured questionnaire. In addition to questionnaire, the other primary data was obtained through interview to and observations. The researcher analysed the quantitative data using descriptive statistics by applying the statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS V.17.0). Conceptual content analysis was used for data that was qualitative in nature or aspect of the data collected from the open ended questions and the interview guide. In addition, a correlation analysis was applied to determine the relative importance of each of the four variables with respect to project outcome. This study found that stakeholders involvement in project implementation contributed most to project outcome (r = 0.971) followed by project review (r= 0.681), then project planning (r =0.651) while projects identification (r = 0.571) had the least influence on project outcome. The study recommends that enough funds and skills should be allocated to projects. The study also recommends that the constituents should play a critical role in decision making because they are the beneficiaries of the projects and know well projects are beneficial to them.