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Introduction
One of the vaguest concepts of project management is project success. Although it is probably the most frequently discussed topic in the field of project management, yet it is the least agreed upon even though for more than two decades, researchers have labored to identify managerial variables critical to project success (Shenhar et al. , 2002).
From detailed literature review, it was found that most of the studies on construction project performances have been conducted in the context of developed world and not enough research studies have been reported for developing countries. In this context, the study of attributes responsible for the performance of Ethiopian public construction projects has been carried out. The Government of Ethiopia is pushing investment in infrastructure in the hope that it will help the country achieve middle-income status by 2025. The construction industry is the highest recipient of government budget in terms of government development program. Consequently, public construction projects consume an average annual rate of nearly 60 percent of the government's capital budget (MoWUD, 2006). Furthermore, construction industry, contributed more than half (56.1 percent) to industrial sector growth and 8.5 percent to GDP growth (NBE, 2015). Ethiopian Government is implementing the Growth and Transformation Plan, a five-year economic development plan through 2015 in which it is spending 569 billion Birr (US$27.1 billion at an exchange rate of Birr 20.99 for $1) on government projects (Ministry for Foreign Affairs, 2014). Large-scale projects are currently being implemented on infrastructure such as the 85,000 km universal rural road access program, inter-regional road initiatives, and railways, not to mention the Grand Renaissance Dam, which is being built in the Western part of Ethiopia and three expansion and nine new sugar plants (Ethiopia Country Report, 2014).
The information above shows that Ethiopia is aggressively working on public infrastructure development to meet the growing demand of ever increasing population of the country, and how the country is trying to catch up with the rest of the world. However the sad part is the failure in schedule performance. This remains one of the major problems in Ethiopian construction industry. For instance, Dessa (2010) in his study examined the performance of 15 completed projects in different regions of Ethiopia and found that the delay encountered in...