Gregory J. Skulmoski - Assistant Professor Zayed University, UAE
Francis T. Hartman - Professor University of Calgary, Canada
George Jergeas - Professor University of Calgary, Canada

Planning is critical to project success. Insufficient planning can result in difficult and costly changes later in a project (Skulmoski 2003). Therefore, we need to understand as much as we can about the project; that is, project feasibility needs to be determined sooner, rather than later. Given the importance, size and complexity of many projects, thoroughly understanding the project is even more critical. But how should we go about these information gathering and analysis tasks? One way to assess project feasibility is to classify the project by looking at its project attributes (e.g. organizational culture, economic climate, resource availability, cost constraints, etc.) rather than focusing on technical or market feasibility. Unfortunately, there are no extant frameworks that are suitable, comprehensive and robust enough for assessing the feasibility of projects. This paper is about presenting the results from an international study about project classification. Specifically, a Complexity-Based Classification Framework was developed and verified during the research and will be detailed in this paper. Finally, we will show how this empirically developed model can be used by owners, contractors and others for comprehensively assessing project feasibility.

Project Feasibility, Initiation, Planning