Assessment of engineering project management integration approach for typical small to medium manufacturing companies

Abstract

Project management can be defined as the application of processes, knowledge, methods, and skills to achieve project objectives. Project management should benefit small and medium scale enterprises (SMEs) the most in their economic part, where failure rates should decline in economic system that practice project management. Any organisation that practice project management should be able to reap the advantages where projects can be completed in an organised manner, within the project timeframe, and within the planned budget. However, there has been a concern over how SMEs susceptible to problems when integrating project management into their organisations. The objectives of this research were to identify the problem areas that hinder the SMEs in applying successful project management, recommending the solutions for the identified problems, and to measure the degree of awareness and implementation of project management for SMEs. The identified general problem areas in project management were: 1) poor basis for the project, 2) appointment failure for project manager, 3) unsupportive top management, and 4) lack of commitment to project. Furthermore, the problems that focused only to SMEs can be identified as: 1) management problems, 2) financial problems, 3) lack of knowledge, 4) project management awareness, 5) labour mobility, and 6) lack of experienced team members. A survey through the distribution of a questionnaire was developed in the current research to measure the awareness and implementation of project management in SMEs. The questionnaire was designed to accommodate the data collection on the background of the respondents, the comprehensive level of project management by respondents, and the implementation level of the concept in the respondents’ organisations. Participants were taken from Pahang and Sarawak states of Malaysia, and 5 out of 45 distributed questionnaires returned for analysis. Statistical Package for Social Science (IBM® SPSS version 23.0) was then used to check the reliability of the collected data and to provide further analysis. The findings show that all participants (100%) are fully aware and have previously heard over the concept of project management. However, only 80% of the respondents perceived that project management is very important. Regardless, all the participants (100%) have been implementing project management within their organisations. Based on the project goals implementation of budget, schedule, and performance, the results of the project management were satisfactorily for the respondents, even though a room for improvement is available. Furthermore, the success factor criteria assessment also revealed that the top management support, clear goals and objectives, planning and control, as well as excellent project manager, to be some of the significant factors in the practice of project management.