Mitigating communication barriers in water supply projects in sri lanka: the client’s perspective

Abstract

Mitigating Communication Barriers in Water Supply Projects in Sri Lanka: The Client’s Perspective Future competition will be managerial competition, and the focus of competition among organizations will be effective communication among the members of the organization and with external organizations. In this regards, this study aims to investigate how communication barriers can be mitigated in water supply projects in Sri Lanka firstly to review the important effective channels, media, directions, formal and informal, barriers and facilitators of communication together with project phases and stakeholders in the construction, secondly to identify the effectiveness of communication in water supply projects thirdly to identify barriers to effective communication in water supply projects and finally to propose measures of mitigation and facilitators/enablers to improve effective communication in water supply projects in Sri Lanka. The study is conducted on Water Board Projects by the author in various national level project implementations. The study was conducted as a Qualitative study and with interview approach to collect the data from various levels of professionals in the project organization. This included projects which are distributed across the country and also which are constituted in one project location as well. Based on research findings, the lack of clear objectives was revealed as the main communication barrier in water supply projects in Sri Lanka. Finally, it is identified as decentralization of project office and standardization of project documents are the leading communication facilitators for effective communication in water supply projects in Sri Lanka.