Investigation and modeling of critical success factors in construction organizations

Profit and success are considered the main drivers of any organization. Achieving this success is based on many factors which have a direct effect on the performance of these organizations. Predicting construction organizations performance helps define the weak organization points in order to improve its performance and increase the profit. In construction organizations, it is more difficult to achieve or maintain a scientific strategy to measure their current success due to the diversity and complexity of construction organizations. Previous studies used questionnaires and interviews with technical and professional persons. However, most of these studies concentrated on the critical success factors on project level. The scope of this study is to investigate the most significant organizational success factors with focus on construction organizations. This paper aims at determining most significant (i.e. critical) success factors, and to develop a model to predict the company performance based on these critical success factors. The potential success factors were surveyed from the literature study. A questionnaire was prepared for evaluating the effect of those potential success factors on organizational performance. The data collected were analyzed using Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). Neuro-Shell software was used to rank the potential success factors utilizing the data obtained from different construction organizations. The critical success factors were used in-turn to develop a NN prediction performance model of construction organizations. The model can be used to predict the performance of a construction organization based on estimatedvalues of its success factors.