Influence of Project Manager's Risk Management Competence on Performance of Mombasa County Government Project, Kenya

Abstract

The general objective of this study was to investigate the Influence of project manager's risk management competence on performance of Mombasa County Government projects. The study findings showed that all the respondents were in agreement that training (mean of 3.6845) and experience (mean of 3.9061) can enhance project performance. It can be seen that both were reliable with coefficients of 0.719 and 0.768 respectively which exceed the proposed threshold of 0.70. Correlation results showed that there were average significant positive relationships between measures of Project Managers risk management Competence and performance.  Training had correlation coefficients of 0.392 and 0.369 with Functionality and Budget respectively. Budget on the other hand had correlation coefficients of between 0.492 and 0.433 with functionality and Budget respectively. The study recommended that Mombasa County Government should train their project team members to enable them adopt risk management practices for their particular project environment. This is because inadequate training of project managers in these established practices is a big impediment to the performances of Mombasa county projects. Appropriate project risk management training and courses should cover the essential skills which can help project managers to handle risks in their organizations and enhance project performance. The project managers can be taken for short courses offered by different colleges in Mombasa on project risk management, seminars, workshops or in house training on risk management and engage qualified personnel to handle the training. The study also recommends that incase of recruitment, Mombasa County need to employ qualified project team who are well trained and have the necessary soft skills and knowledge in project risk management and with vast experience in project risk management. Project managers with higher levels of experience also demonstrate lower levels of risk awareness, so they are likely to spend less effort to identify risks, conduct quantitative and qualitative analysis and design appropriate risk responses. An experienced project manager will be most familiar with risk management tools and techniques and general project risk management process that may be needed in a new project such risk planning, risk identification risk analysis risk, communication, risk monitoring and  risk control.