Measuring Success of PPP Transport Projects: A Cross-Case Analysis of Toll Roads

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to measure ‘overall’ success of a public private partnership (PPP) transport projects using four case studies. All four case studies are PPP toll roads from four different EU countries (UK, Spain, Portugal and Greece). The case studies have been analysed using a manual Qualitative Comparative Analysis approach. According to the paper, three different perspectives have been used to measure the success of a project, that is, project management perspective, stakeholder perspective and contract management perspective. The ‘overall’ success has then been deduced by bringing these three perspectives together as a holistic approach. The findings are presented in the form of a matrix and the final outcome of the paper shows a simple methodological approach that can be used to measure success of a PPP transport project. Since the study takes more of a qualitative approach, researcher bias and perceptions have a major role to play in the final outcome. However, to reduce ‘biasness’, quantitative measures have also been used to quantify the Key Performance Indicators and performance measures in the case studies. It is hoped that the study makes a valid contribution to the areas of transport PPPs and performance measurement.

Keywords:

• key performance indicators (KPI)
• performance measures
• project success
• PPP (Public Private Partnership)
• qualitative comparative analysis (QCA)
• toll roads

Acknowledgements

The findings presented in the paper are taken from the case study database developed as part of the aforementioned project. Herein, case studies developed by Boles and Liyanage (2013), Villalba-Romero and Liyanage (2014), Halkias et al. (2013) and Ribeiro et al. (2013) were very useful for the cross-case analysis. This COST Action is chaired by Prof. Athena Roumboutsos from University of Aegean, Greece. Her immense support in completing the case study database and analysis is very much acknowledged as well. Without her, the work would not have been completed as expected.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This work was supported by the EU COST programme under Grant COST TU1001on ‘Public Private Partnerships in Transport: Trends and Theory’.