Project management Reference Framework (RF) for the Malaysian public projects / Mohd Firdaus Mustaffa Kamal

The inconsistent performance of the public project delivery has spawned the needs to research and identify the underlying issues that affect the public project management capability. One essential finding contributing to this issue was the absence of a commonly recognized Reference Framework (RF) for the public project management. It has been conceived that the absence of such RF has resulted in the inadequate provision of the public project management standard of procedure (SOP) that has in part contributed to the poor performance of the public projects as been highlighted in series of the Auditors1 General Annual Report for the year 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015. This research aims to propose a commonly recognized project management RF that can be used to assist in designing and identifying the provisional needs for the public project SOP. Mixed method approach has been selected as the main method for this research which adopted the sequential exploratory approach. Interviews and questionnaires survey are the main tools used for the data collection. The respondents are mainly professional practitioners within the construction industry who is actively involved in the management of projects. Collected data has been analyzed with the assist of data analysis software namely N-Vivo, Winstep (RASCH) and Statistical Packages for Social Sciences (SPSS). From the result of the analysis, a working framework has been produced and the framework is further validated and tested through two focus groups discussion and through training module adequacy assessment. The findings conceived that the framework is appropriate and can be proposed to be used by the public project management to assist in designing new SOP, and also it has been accepted that this RF can also be applied for the general practice of project management.