Project Management Maturity Analysis for Construction Companies – The Case of Ethiopian Construction Design and Supervision Works Corporation

Abstract

The Ethiopia government is now implementing growth and transformation planswhich focus in various projects in different sectors such as construction of hydro Power plants, highways, rail way projects, and many other infrastructures. Ethiopian construction design and supervision works corporationis one of the national development companies playing a key role in the construction industry. Project maturity analysis is core to capacity building, technology transfer, as well as to stay competitive in the ever growing economy. So far, the company is involved in handling many projects in country and assessing its level of maturity is vitally important for the success of the projects handled and future endeavor. The company wants give due attention to enhancement of the project management capability as a starting point for its significant improvement initiative. The objective of this research is then to assess how mature the Project Management practice using a project management maturity model and at the same time assessing the relative importance and impacts of project management knowledge areas and their correlation with maturity levels. Data have been collected from the management, experts, technical staffs and other employees of the company involved in project execution. From the resultsof analysis using statistical package for social sciences software, the level of organizational overall (average) project management maturity of the companyhas reached the third level of progressive stages of the maturity ladder according to project management maturity model. Nevertheless, there are also some project management knowledge areas lagging behind like time management, cost management and risk management.Time, cost and quality management area are found to have the highest importance levels respectively according to the employee’sperception.Knowledge areas that are considered to be more important are found to be less matured as the spearman‘s rank correlation coefficient in this regard is found to be - 0.772.