Strategies model of time performance for flood mitigation projects

Abstract

Over the years, Government of Malaysia through the Department of Irrigation and Drainage, Malaysia (DID) has allocated significant amount of budget on structural and non-structural measures to mitigate flooding. The flood mitigation project has been implemented and carefully planned by the government with the specific objectives of reducing and avoiding the negative effects of flooding on the environment and livelihood. In order to recognise its importance, the project’s performance must at best be preserved throughout the project’s life cycle. However, the implementation of the flood mitigation projects has been hampered by rising cases of poor time performance which caused by a wide range of factors. Furthermore, previous studies on project time performance were mainly focused on other civil engineering projects where the findings could not be directly adopted for solving time performance issues in flood mitigation projects. The lack of strategic reference that can be used by stakeholders in the decision-making process is seen as one of the obstacles to the successful implementation of flood mitigation projects. This research aims to develop a problem-solving model as a strategic reference to mitigate and improve poor time performance of flood mitigation projects authorised under DID. By realizing the issue of poor time performance, there is a need to support the research aim through these objectives: (1) to explore time performance of flood mitigation projects in Malaysia, (2) to examine critical activities affecting time performance of flood mitigation projects, (3) to evaluate the challenges within the critical activities that affect time performance of flood mitigation projects, (4) to propose strategies to address challenges of critical activities that affect time performance in flood mitigation projects, and (5) to develop a strategies model of time performance for flood mitigation projects. The research was conducted in three main phases: (1) exploring and analysing time performance of flood mitigation project through project document studies, (2) questionnaire survey to examine critical activities affecting time performance which the instruments were developed through the matrix mapping process and analysed using Partial Least Square - Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM), then validated by Subject Matter Expert (SME) on flood mitigation field, (3) model development using critical activities generated from the PLS-SEM analysis and proposed strategies to overcome challenges in flood mitigation projects. Based on the findings, there are more than 50% of flood mitigation projects implementation performed behind time while 21 critical activities were identified affecting time performance out of 85 activities tabulated by SMEs and literatures. Besides that, 60 challenges were determined within the critical activities affecting time performance and 133 strategies were proposed to address the challenges. The establishment of the critical activities together with the challenges and strategies has led to the development of a model called “Strategies Model of Time Performance for Flood Mitigation Projects”. The developed model is expected to assist the government to face unprecedented challenges in implementing future flood mitigation projects.