Exploring the use of Project Management concepts ...

and techniques in our establishment

By Francis Kwaku Egu

Introduction

One major problem that has afflicted tertiary institutions in Ghana in recent times is acute accommodation shortages. The problem was so serious that management of these institutions introduced the non residence policy. Under this policy certain category of students were admitted as non resident students while some were granted resident status. The policy was so new in Ghana and therefore created a lot of problems and brought untold hardship on students. Eventually the authorities in most of these institutions decided to solve the problem by constructing more halls of residence.

A 6000 room hall of residence was earmarked for construction to ease the pressure on the existing halls in one of these institutions. The project which is now completed was to take three years, but it took five years to complete. The delay, it was argued could be attributed to lack of proper project management practices and techniques. This paper will attempt to explore the use of project management concept and techniques to analyse the cause of the delay in completing the project on time.

Scope and Objective of the Project

Scope according to Burke (1992) has been defined by PMBOK as ‘subdividing a major project deliverables into smaller, more manageable components’. Burke believes the subdivisions improve accuracy of estimates and assign single responsibilities to work packages.

At the inception of the construction of the 6000 room hall, the objectives were properly spelt out. It was to improve the accommodation problem on campus. It was envisaged that the solution to this problem would make it possible for the institution to increase students’ intake. It would also assist the institution to achieve its expansion drive and to maintain its status as a star institution.

The problem of this enormous project started when it came to the definition of the project scope. One would have expected that a huge project such as the construction of a 6000 room hall of residence would be divided into smaller and more manageable components in the project scope. However that was not the case, all the team did was to divide the scope into three phases. Each of these phases was to take a year to complete. The first phase was the excavation and erection of the building up to lintel level. The second phase was roofing, electrical and plumbing fittings. The third and final phase was the interior and exterior decorations. A very important project management feature like how the project could be approached was omitted from the scope. It was agreed among the stakeholders that the third phase of the project must be handled by the works and estate department of the institute.

Human Resource Management of the Project

In accordance with project management practices a special project office was set up to handle the project. This office was placed directly under the development office of the institutional set up. Strangely the matrix system of organisational structure was adopted to run the office. The argument put forward to justify this choice of organisational structure was that the project was temporal and members of the team (who were basically the staff) would go back to their various posts after the completion of the project. This choice was a big flaw and contributed to the delay in completing the project on time. It would have been more reasonable if a functional organisational structure was adopted to run the project. This could have helped the team to draw from the technical expertise of staffs from the development office as well as the estates department. They were well trained and had several years of work experience up their sleeves and could contribute immensely to the success of the project.

Just like any other project, a project manager was appointed to coordinate activities of the project. He was to be assisted by the functional heads of the development office and estate department. The most important thing was he was given a free hand to select his team with very little interference from the top. He assembled a team and the project began amidst pomp and pageantry that followed the sod cutting. As the project progressed there was discontent among the members of the team.

The general view expressed by team members was that the project manager’s leadership style was appalling. They were of the view that he lacked leadership skills and technical know how to manager such an important project. They accused him of not viewing the project from a holistic perspective and thus causing the delay of some activities which any good project manager could have crashed. The general view was that a good project manager could have handled the situation better than he did.

Prior to the commencement of the project, he and his team had a meeting with the stakeholders to discuss the project. Several other regular status meetings were held during the life cycle of the project. During such meetings the team often expressed the view that the project manager often hijacked the day-to-day activities of the project. They expected him to pick an assistant who would be effective in driving the team to complete the project.

However team members who argued in favour of the project manager were of the view that the nature of the project put the project manager in a precarious situation. There were so many demands and interferences from top management. They needed the hall to be completed in time so first year students could be admitted into the hall. In situations like this what the project manager could have done was to fall on team members for support. Surprisingly he ignored his team members and did things his own way. This worked seriously against him.

Defining Planning

Planning definition for the project was not any thing to write home about. It was poorly handled. One expects that before the project began the project manager would have created an overall project work plan which would help the team in estimating the total project effort and duration (Burke 1992). He should have also mapped out the detailed work for the next few months to ensure that the project resources were assigned correctly when the project started. In addition, the project manager must have an agreed-on set of project management procedures that would be used to manage the project. These should have also included managing scope, risks, communication, and work plan. He should have done all these upfront so that the expectations of the stake holders could be managed better by him and his team.

All the project manager did was to brief the team on the project budget and timeline for the initiative. The project was to be wrapped up in 3 years; however no detail was given on the budget. He also cautioned them of tough times ahead without explaining what the tough times were.

Project Management Techniques

Application of Critical Path Analysis (CPA) Critical Path Analysis (CPA) was adopted as the main technique for the project. Critical Path Analysis and PERT according to Burke are powerful tools that help to schedule and manage complex projects. They were developed in the 1950s to control large defence projects, and have been used routinely since then. (Burke 1992)

In their application of CPA the project team knew that certain activities could not start until others were finished. They therefore made sure the activities were completed in a sequence, with each stage being more or less completed before the next stage began in a sequential manner. (Burke 1992) However this was not handled properly. The activities were not scheduled satisfactorily. Critical path activities which were supposed to be crushed were not crushed. This caused so many delays on most of the lines. Under normal circumstances what the project manager should have done was to take the load from critical areas and spread them evenly across. The most critical part was he failed to identify float areas and therefore could not properly allocate resources. As a result of this he as not able to save some cost labour and hiring of equipments.

The team in using CPA however made conscious attempt to show the earliest start date of each activity. They gave the estimated length of time it would take, and whether it was parallel or sequential. They were able to identify sequential activity and showed which stage each depended on. The strange part of it was that this was not followed properly. (Burke 1992)

Resource allocation

The construction of the hall involved numerous activities and each activity required resources (e.g., people, material, equipment) and time to complete. The team realised that the more resources allocated to any activity, the shorter the time that may be needed to complete it, and since the hall needed to be completed on time, the resources could have been handled better than it was handled. The hall was not completed on schedule. This resulted in more expenditure and the project out running its budget. More resources had to be pumped into the project. The budgeted cost was 12 billon cedis (approx. $ 146, 0000 in 2003) but this shot up to twice the amount due to the delay in the project.

Scheduling of Activities

The team knew that they could not begin erecting the walls without excavating the foundation and the roofing could not be done without laying the blocks to roofing level. In fact they did all the activities in a sequence. This helped them to be able to calculate the sum of the activity’s durations. This could not have been possible had the activities been accomplished simultaneously. (Burke 1992). The sequencing of activities can be shown by drawing a network of links and nodes. CPM Networks

According to Burke there are two kinds of networks:

• Activity-on-Node (AON), and

• Activity-on-Link (AOL) or Activity on Arc (AOA). The team used this network for the project. Taking activities A, B, C, D, and E as a sequence, the team knew activity C could not begin until A and B were completed, and E must begin after D is completed, and D must follow C. The Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)

The work breakdown structure according to Burke (1992) defines the total scope of the project: only the work captured in the WBS is in the scope of the project and able to be scheduled and costed. (Burke 1992) That was what exactly what the team failed to do. They did not decompose the project into smaller work packages so that it could be scheduled and costed properly. At least these packages could be given out as sub contracts. For instance the electrical works could be designed as a work package and sublet. All the carpentry work could have also been given out. The project was only divided into three phases.

Later on when the team realised they could not meet the deadline for the project, they decided to break the work packages into small manageable work packages. They used the “yellow sticky" in designing the work packages structure. They wrote all the work packages on sticky notes and arranged them into the WBS hierarchy. They then wrote the name of a work package on a single "sticky" and collectively arranged the WBS into the tree structure. As a starting point, the team chose the high level structure known as functional department. This method helped in creating understanding about project scope, roles and responsibilities better (Burke 1992).

Conclusion

Bad project management practices contributed to the failure of such an important project. This increased the cost of the project to twice its original budget. Apart from that there was so much interference from top management. This did not give the project team the independence they needed to carry out their duties. Though the team could not be blamed solely for the failure of the project, many people were of the view that the team did not only fail to take advantage of opportunities, but were also very poor at problem solving. That explained the reason why it took the team five years to complete a project which was supposed to have a three year life cycle.

Francis Kwaku Egu (Finance & Investment Analyst), UK

Research Associate- Licensed International Financial Analyst (LIFA) –USA

[email protected]