Public sector organisations responsible for infrastructure development in most non-industrialised countries, which include infrastructure departments/ministries, parastatal organisations and other statutory organisations qualify as project-oriented organisations (POO). There are strong indications to suggest that these organisations' project management (PM) competencies leave a lot to be desired. At face value they purport to be fully fledged project-oriented organisations and performing as competent PM organisations, while in reality they are predominantly dependent on accidental project managers. This paper reports on a study that was carried out in one of the large infrastructure departments in South Africa. The focus is on one of the premiere programmes managed by the department. The management of the programme is scrutinised in order to establish the department/ministry's PM competence. An evaluation of the performance of the programme was carried out in relation to the ministry's mandate in order to assess its PM competence. It is found that the programme in its current form could be described as a 'white elephant' and a programme that does not have an appropriate organisation structure, nor appropriate and sufficient staff to carry out its objectives. The programme's management system is found to be very poor and at the lowest level of maturity (level 1 out of 5). Recommendations are made that the programme in its current form cannot fulfil its mandate successfully without a fundamental overhaul, addressing its organisational structure, personnel qualifications and programme management system.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.