Identifying the Guidelines for Management of the Oil Industry Mega-projects, using the Assessment of Success Factors

Despite the high importance of the oil industry mega-projects in IRAN, it is clear that there is no robust condition to get succession in these projects. One of the reasons is addressed by the ignorance of the true project management. The aim of this research is to identify and prioritize the oil project success factors, and to identify the guidelines to manage these projects. This work is an applied research and the research method is descriptive. All of the research stages include Nominal Group Technique (NGT) to elicit judgments of 12 experts. A list of success factors, containing the relevant project management knowledge areas, is obtained with the use of library study, literature review and the expert elicitation. In order to assign the weights to the factors and prioritize them, knowledge areas are ranked as BORDA numbers, as well as the relevant success factors. The obtained ranks are transformed to the weights, using Rank Order Centroid (ROC) method. Then a geometric mean is carried out to get the final weigh of the success factors. Finally, some guidelines are recommended for the projects, with the use of the experts judgments. The research findings include 42 success factors and 46 guidelines. The results show that the most important factors, with more than 25% of the total weight, are alignment between objectives and activities, clarity of scope, and stability of program managers.