The demand for project management professionals and practitioners is increasingly vital to many areas of business today as a result of organizations embarking on complex projects with the view in creating unique products and services. According to Ackah, D. (2016) in his research article “why many projects fail to complete in Africa”, planning projects require Professional Competence Baseline (PCB) in scope, budget, schedule and quality management which he describe as the major projects constraints known as the project trapezium. In Africa, many government projects are not completed on the scheduled project time.
This is because of delays which characterize projects in many places, including Ghana. For example, in the construction industry shortcomings like poor understanding of the project, lack of modern equipment, incompetent contractors, inadequate supervision, etc. result in delayed completion of projects, cost overruns and compromised quality. Due to its several circumstances, including political stability, relatively good governance and fast economic growth trajectory, Ghana is host to several and major development projects and landmark reforms. There is a plethora of on-going and competed projects which provide sufficient evidence of the characteristics that affect the fate of projects.
Many government projects suffer the peril of non-completion. This situation is much pronounced in government roads and bridges projects, hydropower projects, thermal power projects, housing projects, agricultural projects, educational policies & programmes, and directly affects the lives of the people and the government’s development agenda. The profession of project management is changing rapidly. Organizations have evolved their ability to define and implement new areas of work, with more integration of project management principles and more focus on the long-term benefits.
Project management, then, is established as the preeminent method for making change in organizations and businesses and project, programme and portfolio managers are leading the way. The professionals of tomorrow will work in distributed environments with overlapping and often conflicting stakeholder interests, challenged with too much information and not enough communication and judged by their ability to deliver products or services that align with short and long term strategies, to deliver benefits.
In order to avoid the menace of projects’ non-completion, regulating project professional and practitioners with professional’s certification has been identified as one of the root cause measure to adopt as mitigating measure. According to Martin J. Williams (2016), “Using an original database of over 14,000 small development projects in Ghana, I estimate that approximately one-third of projects that start is never completed, consuming nearly one-fifth of all local government capital spending”.
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