Article Review Assignment of Project Management

managerial economics (Mekdela Amba University)

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 ADMAS UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF POSTGRADUATE STUDIES

MASTERS OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION

PROJECT MANAGEMENT

ARTICLE REVIEW

ASSIGNMENT

Reviewed Article Title

Success Factors and Criteria in the Management of International

Development Projects: Evidence from Projects Funded by the
European Union (EU) in Ethiopia.

By:

Submitted to:

Submission Date

November, 2022

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Article Title: Success Factors and Criteria in the Management of International Development
Projects: Evidence from Projects Funded by the European Union (EU) in
Ethiopia.
Authors: Yitbarek Takele Bayiley and Getachew Kahsay Teklu, (2016).
Journal Name: International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, 9(3), 562-582.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/IJMPB-06-2015-0046.
1 Purpose of the article

The main purpose of the article was analysing the results of a survey that aims to explore and
identify the European Union (EU) Development Cooperation project success factors and
criteria and explain the relationship between the critical success factors (CSFs) and project
success as perceived by the project managers and team members of the organizations
participated in the survey. The author’s conceptualize the International Development Projects
(IDPs) as projects financed mainly by multilateral and bilateral development agencies that
focus on development issues such as poverty alleviation, health, education, agriculture, food
security, trade, private sector development and institutional capacity building in developing
countries and management of these projects have more tangible objectives and deliverables.
2 Central argument of the article

The article indicates that, despite the special attributes of EU projects, still managing IDPs in
the context of developing countries presents many challenges where there is evidence of
political instability which cause project delays, cost overruns, complicated stakeholder
management, resignation of key manpower, among others that may in effect put the project as
challenged or failed. Such adversarial behaviour results in politics and resource control
conflict and challenges to PMs managing ID projects. Beside such challenges, the article
central argument was to understand and analyze the CSFs for the EU development
cooperation projects, the relationship between the CSFs and project success, practices of the
stakeholder in ranking the success criteria of projects and the perception among stakeholders
in perspective of success criteria.
3 Specific project management issues defined

The article outlined that ensuring a successful IDP management through the satisfaction of
factors that are critical for project success becomes crucial for both donors and beneficiary
countries. This trend has corresponded with a demand by the wide range of project
stakeholders for increasingly high levels of accountability and performance, and hence a need
for increasingly refined project management systems. The authors indicates that, the EU

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projects were characterized by the relative intangibility of their ultimate objective of poverty
reduction, complexity and size. Also their project success is characterized by ambiguity and
the project management literature on project success falls short in addressing their specificity.
Moreover, the article pointed that the EU bodies select projects for funding in accordance
with EU’s strategic priorities and must be managed in accordance with the EU operational
and financial rules. The size, complexity and importance of EU projects in economic,
political and other terms call for the application of project management throughout a project’s
implementation. Thus, the article attempts to put forth the views of different researchers and
practitioners in basic features of project management in International Development
Cooperation through exploring and identifying the success criteria and CSFs in managing EU
funded projects and their relationship among themselves.
4 Major project management issues considered in the article

As the nature of managing IDPs are varied and vast in in terms of project implementation
strategy, the article focused on effectiveness of managing aid projects. The article considered
different factors related to project management issues such as leadership related factors
(project mission, top management support, communication), stakeholder engagement factors
(client consultation, communication, client acceptance), technical expertise factors
(personnel, technical task, trouble-shooting) and operational planning and control factors
(project schedule/plans, monitoring and feedback, trouble-shooting). Additionally the article
outlined different key critical success factors that are expected to influence project success
under different phases of the project such as conceptualizing phase factors, planning phase
factors, implementing phase factors, closing phase factors and overall project success factors.
Finally, the article also considered issues related to project success criteria by evaluating the
relevance of projects, efficiency of the projects, project effectiveness, impact and
sustainability of the projects based on assessing stakeholders ranking of the success criteria of
the EU projects.
5 Approaches of the specific project management topic under-review

The Project Management Institute defines project management as “the application of

knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet the project
requirements.” The article suggested that, for project management to be effective, it must be
tailored to the organization’s project types, human resource capabilities, and company
culture. Thus, the authors examined the EU project success factors and criteria through the

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phased project management approaches which follows activities in managing EU projects on
project success falls in addressing their specificity.
6 Research methodology adopted

The author’s employed interpretive research design, abductive approach, and survey as a
strategy, a cross-sectional time horizon and questionnaire as data collection instrument. The
article also applied exploratory research design to assess project critical success factors and
explanatory design to examine the relationships between success factors and project success.
The authors used both primary and secondary data to identifying the degree of importance of
CSFs. The author’s primary source of data was collected through questionnaires and
unstructured interviews from the project team members of EU delegation to Ethiopia,
government organizations and NGOs while the secondary sources of data included extensive
review of literature, EU project management implementation manuals, research papers,
working papers, web documents, journal articles and books. The study used convenience
sampling technique (type of non-probability sampling) where the sample is taken from a
group of people easy to contact or to reach.
7 Results of the study

The article findings identified a specific set of four factors that determine the success of
projects funded by the EU: intellectual capital, sound project case, key manpower
competency and effective stakeholder engagement. Moreover, the author’s descriptive survey
highlighted five critical success variables: clear policies of donors and recipient government,
strong local ownership of project, effective consultation during planning, high motivation and
interest, and compatible rules and procedures. At end the author’s findings captures and
investigates the perception of the existing possible indicators for project success evaluation
across the different stakeholders. Hence, according to the perceptions of the respondents in
the current study, relevance, impact, effectiveness, sustainability and efficiency are ranked,
respectively according to their level of importance to evaluate the success of the EU
development projects.
8 Strength and weakness of the study

The article have importance in terms of contributing new finding to the existing literature by
providing useful insights and perspectives in the identification of CSF and success criteria to
developmental projects that researchers and practitioners in the field shall give attention.
Furthermore, the author’s sets out clear objectives for their study and articulates the specific
research questions to be investigated. In addition, topic of the article was clearly defined and

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 the article was written in a logical way of scientific papers and the argument presented well
and supported with previous studies. Besides, the article is failed to incorporate the
qualitative data analysis and the sampling method cannot guarantee respondent understands
questions and difficulty in verifying target respondents. Finally, the article findings were not
generalizable as it doesn’t include the beneficiaries (community) perception and beliefs
through in-depth interviews which cannot adequately understood the project susses in the
context of local community.
9 Lesson learned from the article

The article writing system is clear, concise, focused, structured and backed up by evidence to
aid the reader’s understanding. Therefore, the key concepts that would be learned from this
article used for writing scientific papers/research are:
i. How a study would be written in a logical order by bringing together related points and
findings.
ii. Way of study topic formulation and an understanding of the subject by reviewing
previous studies then outline previous research gap for formulating research questions,
objectives and hypothesis.
iii. Ways of demonstrating knowledge of the subject area, supporting opinions and
arguments with evidence and accurate citations.
iv. Ways of formulating study variables and measurements based on previous studies
v. Methods of developing a research design that describes the procedures and approaches
used to conduct and evaluate the study.
vi. Methods of selecting target study population, sampling methods, methods of data
collection and data analysis.
vii. Understanding ways of analyzing results of the study using different statistical methods,
then interpretation and discussion of the study findings in accordance with similar
studies.
viii. Finally, concepts that would be learned from the article was formulation of conclusion
and recommendations based on study findings.

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