Article Preview
TopIntroduction
The major problem confronting every successive administration in Nigeria is lack of basic infrastructure meant for the populace. Millions of hard-earned taxpayer money is expended on failed projects. A project is considered failed when it has not delivered in term of cost, quality, and time based on the projected target and it basic expectations have not been met. Poor management of key public infrastructure projects has caused the failure of most government projects. This is not unconnected with human factors. United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) noted that some projects were not successful in Nigeria as a result of breakdown in communication among the project managers, programme managers and people who designed the projects (Cynthia, 2018). Apart from project failure, most projects awarded by the Federal, State and Local government are not executed at all. These projects are given to non-professionals and professionals with little expertise in the project domain. This has led to many abandoned projects in the country.
Literatures dwell on success factors in project management and little emphasis is placed on why project actually failed. Even when discussing the success factors, the effects of project management team characteristics that produced the success are largely ignored. Walid and Oya (1996) believes that project managers' competence is a critical factor that affects project planning, scheduling and communication. It is a general consensus among researchers that the qualities of project team members are crucial to success or failure of any project (Bernard et al., 2011; Sadi et al., 2014, Nathaniel et al., 2017).
To avert project failure, some of the metrics used for evaluation of project team are given in Shashi Consulting (2018). These criteria bother on the versatility of certain qualifications for the individuals that would serve in the project team and the criteria for selecting the team manager, members and roles to assign to each team member. Selecting wrong individuals into a project management team ensures that the project is “dead” on arrival. Also, where the team manager is wrongly chosen, even with the right management team, the project is certain to fail. That is, the right selection of each member of the group is essentially important for good result.
Indeed, many factors could result in project failure. Such factors according to Walid and Oya (1996) include factors related to the project, factors related to the project manager and the team members, factors related to the organization, factors related to the external environment project managers' performance and environmental factors. Rosanne (2019) lists ten main causes of project failure as:
- •
Poor preparation
- •
Inadequate documentation and tracking
- •
Bad leadership
- •
Failure to define parameters and enforce them
- •
Inexperienced project managers
- •
Inaccurate cost estimations
- •
Little communication at every level of management
- •
Culture or ethical misalignment
- •
Competing priorities
- •
Disregarding project warning signs
In most cases these factors are interrelated.