Balance score card - a strategic project management tool for infrastructure development projects

Abstract

In today’s global context in infrastructure development, projects require critical review at different viewpoints such as Investor, Consultants, Contractors and End-users. Since the beginning of the 1990s experts have introduced terms such as “modern project management”, “management-by-projects”, “projects (Project Management) culture” and “beyond the Gantt chart” to distinguish contemporary future forms of Project Management from traditional past forms. Such terms, in part, propose the existence of a discipline, referred to in the remainder of this dissertation as either “Strategic PM” or “Emergent PM” that is characterised by as being “broader in its application, concepts and methods than traditional PM”. Out of many approaches that can be adopted in strategic PM, the BSC model was selected in this research as an effective tool in PM to evaluate project outcomes through; Financial perspective; Customer perspective; Internal perspective and Innovation and learning perspective. In order to compare the effectiveness of the proposed model over the conventional PM practices, a questionnaire survey was conducted among the stakeholders of a sample selected infrastructure development projects. The responses collected were evaluated through statistical analysis and inferences. Results obtained indicated that most of present organizations which undertake infrastructure projects follow PM techniques above 65% in order to manage their projects, the staff engaged in such projects (especially engineers), have averagely 67% knowledge about such techniques. Using this proposed tool, an organization, project manager or a team of project leaders can evaluate the project deliverables in different perspectives supported from the tool.