Factors affecting the performance of public projects in Taiwan

There are many factors affecting the performance of public projects which are reviewed by the responsible entities (Government engineering agency) and controlled by the contractors. However, responsible entities and contractors have different viewpoints to identify the primary influential factors of a project because of differences in their roles and responsibility. Sometimes these differences cause a prime source for a project's defect, schedule delay, and even lawsuit. In order to perform a project successfully, the differences in the viewpoint of these two entities must first be understood clearly. To this end, this study synthesizes possible 91 influential factors of transportation projects from Taiwan official reports. Followed by the multi-criteria evaluation procedure and fuzzy analytic hierarchy process, the primary influential factors are screened out and ranked with the priority orders. Surprisingly, there are forty co-primary factors selected by both the responsible entities and the contractors. However, it is found that the priority orders for the factors ranked by the responsible entities are somewhat different from those ranked by the contractors. The reasons why the rank orders are different between responsible entities and contractors are discussed. This is a comprehensively done research project and will be very useful for the personnel involved in oversea construction projects.