The impacts of project management and government support on project's economy: a comparative study of precast concrete factories in Iraq

Construction projects are among the important projects for each country, and consideration it given to construction costs, time used for implementation, and quality. Implementation of projects with PCF (precast concrete factory) it considered one of the important projects that it distinguished from projects implemented in the traditional way. This type of construction should highlighted in view of the closure of many of these factories, which in turn causes a weakness in the construction in terms of speed and quantity, in addition to the termination of the service of the employees who work in PCF and their projects. Therefore, some independent variables (project management and government support) that affect the dependent variable (project economy) as studied. The hypothesis of the study included that there is an effect by the first independent variable (project management) on the dependent variable (project economy), and the effect of the second independent variable (government support) on the dependent variable (project economy). The study also imposed that there are differences between the three projects included in this research. Primary data collected through interviews with project managers, the main data collected through a questionnaire (Likert scale with five options: strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree, and strongly disagree). This questionnaire contained three sections, the first section is concerned with questions about the dependent variable (project economy), the second section is concerned with questions about the first independent variable (project management), and the third section is concerned with questions about the second independent variable (government support). This questionnaire distributed to the study sample, which included three PCF, and the number of respondents was 75 respondents in these factories. The data taken from the questionnaire was analysed to find out the responses of the respondents. Most of the respondents were strongly agree that there is an effect by the first and second independent variables (project management and government support) on the dependent variable (project economy), in addition to that they strongly agreed that there is negative impact on the economy of their PCF. Then the data transferred from the ordinal data to the interval data to see the extent of the influence of the independent variables on the dependent variable by doing a multiple linear regression analysis, the results came that there is an effect by the first independent variable and there is no effect by the second independent variable. Independent samples t-test analysis was used to test the hypothesis that there are differences between the three projects. The results came to find there are differences in influencing the project economy between the first project and the second project, where the first project was less affected by the second project, but there were no differences between the second project and Third or first project and third project. The study recommended studying the independent variables that affect the project economy that was not add it to this study, in addition to appointing project managers with expertise and competence in the field of project management by shareholders or investors, as well as the government's interest in this type of project.