| dc.description.abstract | Procurement is an important area of construction dealing as it does with the overall
planning, management and organization of a project from inception to completion.
The procurement of construction projects in Kenya as with many other
commonwealth countries has since independence been dominated by the traditional
procurement method and a comparison of the kind undertaken in this research
would not have been possible some time in the past. In the last few decades
however, new methods of procurement have been developed whose main deviation
from the traditional method is the emphasis on management and/or project
integration.
A lot of benefits have been claimed to accrue from use of the contemporary
procurement methods particularly with regard to the three pillars of project
performance namely programme, budget and product also referred to as time, cost
and quality performance. It was found necessary therefore to study a sample of
projects that have used each of either traditional procurement methods and the
contemporary procurement methods to try and determine if the claimed benefits
indeed exist in the local context. The study concentrates on time and cost
performance of these projects. Another area of study is on whether proper
consideration is given to the choice of procurement method that matches the needs
of the project and the evaluation is done using a client priority based evaluation
chart.
The findings that emerge show that indeed, projects that were carried out using the
alternative procurement methods performed better in terms of adherence to
programme and budget and this findings are confirmed by a statistical test of
hypotheses. It also emerges that in many projects, the procurement method selected
may not have been the best as it did not rnatcn the needs of the project thus putting | en |
