A Study on public private partnerships in Sri Lanka : barriers, critical success factors and project management challenges

Abstract

Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) have emerged as one of the vastly used and recognised method in sourcing public infrastructure in a multitude of countries. Those countries have effectively utilized PPPs to yield substantial advantages. Many researchers have identified the critical success factors of successful PPP projects in order to facilitate future PPP projects and some other researchers have identified barriers to successful implementation of PPPs and project management challenges of PPPs which help to achieve the success of future projects. However, due to its inherent sophisticated nature and lengthy life period of PPPs, overcoming such barriers and project management challenges as well as using critical success factors are always challenging for people who manage PPPs for the entirety the project life cycle from inception to implementation. The aim of this research to carry out a comprehensive study on barriers, critical success factors and project management challenges of Public-Private Partnership projects in Sri Lanka. A systematic literature review has been done and semi-structured interviews were conducted with industry practitioners who possess experience in at least one PPP project in management level to identify successful and unsuccessful PPP projects barriers, critical success factors and project management challenges. The research findings identified, mainly, “Queen Elizabeth Jetty at Colombo Port project” and “LAUGFS Liquefied Petroleum Gas Terminal project” as successful PPPs and “first attempt of the Katunayaka highway project” and “Colombo Rapid Transit System (RTS) project” as unsuccessful PPPs. “Opposition from the general population” and “inadequate legal framework” are major barriers and “political support” and “reasonable risk allocation” are the main CSFs of PPPs. “Poor risk assessment” and “lack of resources” are the main project management challenges of PPPs in Sri Lankan Context. “Early planning” and “adopting good communication strategies” were found as main solutions to minimise the project management challenges and barriers.