Projects remain the instruments of choice for policy makers in international development. Yet, paradoxically, the poor performance of projects and the disappointment of project stakeholders and beneficiaries seem to have become the rule and not the exception in contemporary reality. Dissatisfaction with project results and performance dates back to the 1950s (see, for example, John F. Kennedy's speech to Congress in 1961). The project failure rate at the World Bank was over 50% in Africa until 2000 (see the 2000 Meltzer Commission). The World Bank's private arm, the International Finance Corporation has discovered that only half of its African projects succeed. In an independent rating, the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) claimed that 39% of World Bank projects were unsuccessful in 2010 (e.g. Chauvet et al., 2010). World Bank projects all too frequently fail to achieve their goals due to a number of problems that could be termed “managerial” and “organizational” (Kwak, 2002): imperfect project design, poor stakeholder management, delays between project identification and start-up, delays during project implementation, cost overruns, coordination failure, etc. (Youker, 1999, Kilby, 2000 and Ahsan and Gunawan, 2010).Surprisingly, the focus of most international development research to date has been very narrow, examining projects and Project Management in general, despite the size of this industry sector ($120 billion U.S. a year in 2009), project proliferation, and the questionable outcomes of projects (Crawford and Bryce, 2003, Roodman, 2006 and Ahsan and Gunawan, 2010). Further, the Project Management literature has focused little on international development projects, or typically, World Bank projects (Crawford and Bryce, 2003, Ahsan and Gunawan, 2010 and Ika et al., 2010). In particular, very little has been written on international development project success, success criteria and critical success factors (Diallo and Thuillier, 2004, Diallo and Thuillier, 2005, Khang and Moe, 2008 and Ika et al., 2010).
However, World Bank projects are very specific because of their unique environment. They are characterized by a rare complexity, the high delicacy and the relative intangibility of their ultimate objective of poverty reduction, their large number of heterogeneous stakeholders,4 the divergent perspectives among these stakeholders, the need for compromise, their charm in the eyes of politicians, the profound cultural and geographical gap between project designers and their beneficiaries, and the prevalence of rather bureaucratic rules and procedures (Honadle and Rosengard, 1983, Rondinelli, 1983, Gow and Morss, 1988, Youker, 1999, Kwak, 2002, Crawford and Bryce, 2003, Diallo and Thuillier, 2004, Diallo and Thuillier, 2005, Khang and Moe, 2008 and Ika et al., 2010).
This paper analyzes the results of a survey that aims to explore the success factors of the World Bank projects and offers insights into the relationship between critical success factors (CSFs) and project success as perceived by World Bank project supervisors. This research holds a global view of World Bank project supervision, conceptualizing the critical success factors as a multidimensional concept. As a result, this research contributes to the generic CSF literature in Project Management. It highlights a specific set of five CSFs: monitoring, coordination, design, training, and institutional environment. These could be termed World Bank project supervision CSFs. While the first four are more or less under the control of World Bank project supervisors, the last is beyond their control. The research then shows that there is a statistically significant and positive relationship between each of the five CSFs and project success. Second, it emphasizes the importance of design and monitoring for World Bank project supervisors in the context of program approach and calls for refocusing of project supervision from demonstrating results to much needed managing of objectives for results in order to meet project, program, and development goals.
