ASSESSMENT OF CONTRACT ADMINISTRATION PERFORMANCE IN ETHIOPIAN ROAD SECTOR

Abstract

The underperformance of road construction projects in Ethiopia has led to time delays, budget overruns, substandard quality, and dissatisfaction of stakeholders, among other issues. It was largely believed that they were caused by poor contractor’s performance. Each construction project party can be the cause of these performance issues. Contract administration performance of the client or the consultant significantly affect the success of the project. The objective of this study was to assess the performance of Ethiopian Roads Sector (ERS) contract administration (CA). A five-point Likert scale based questionnaire was prepared to gather the opinions of clients (ERS CA), contractors and consultants. Depending on a non-probability sampling technique, 87 respondents were considered for the study. Cronbach’s alpha (α), which is the measure of reliability of collected data, was 0.98. It indicated that the values were internally consistent and highly reliable. Relative importance index (RII) and ranking were conducted for 21 major performance indicator groups. The results indicated that the performance of ERS CA in performance monitoring and reporting management, project governance and start-up, as well as regularity of field visit were highly important performance indicators (RII ≥ 0.8) ranked 1 to 3 consecutively. The least performance indicators were ERS CA team were free from corruption, contract risk management, and timely solving of row, quarry site and camp land problems (0.6 ≤RII<0.8) ranked 19 to 21 consecutively. It was concluded that ERS CA performance was acceptable and very satisfactory at 85.71%.