60% of projects fail in Nigeria — UNIDO 

Project management experts in the country say the country records just about 39 per cent success in all its projects due to variations in plans, defective planning and inefficient management resulting in 60 per cent of projects failure. Project Management is an innovative management practice that tends to achieve stated or specified objectives within specific time and budget limits through optimum use of resources.

Speaking in Kaduna at the Project Management and Team Building Workshop by the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) in collaboration with the Federal Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment (FMITI) for Project Managers in the Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs), Mr Mark Engelhardt, Consultant and Trainer for UNIDO said that projects are vulnerable to failure because of myriad problems including lack of initiative and proper planning.

Though Engelhardt acknowledged that the problems of project failure are not peculiar to Nigeria, he said projects success in the last 20 years have been within 38- 39 per cent.

“It is a problem, a universal problem and it is universal problem because projects are complex and unique, it requires specific skills to manage these problems.”

He believed that the country can improve its chances of success from the current 39 per cent to about 50 per cent.

“There is a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP); how to initiate and plan a project so that your chances of success are substantially higher. So instead of having 39 per cent success rate, maybe you can go up to 49 or to 50.

“They can stand anywhere in the world and use the same vocabulary, use the same terminology and the key thing to this advantage of an international standard is that you don’t have to reinvent the wheels; other people have the same problems.”

Mr. Mithat Kulur, Project Lead Advisor of UNIDO said countries including Nigeria, invest millions of dollars on projects, bring on board the services of international expatriates using local resources to meet the compelling demands of those projects, yet experienced over 60 per cent project failure within the framework of governmental systems.

“He said: “In project management, a project fails not only when the project delivery refuses to meet the use or the needs of the project or when the project’s product refuses to satisfy the end-user, but when the project is not accomplished within the allowed time frame, project budget, scope defined for the project and even when the outcome of the project is rejected by the stakeholder.

“Most often, the reason project fails is the inability of the government to separate the political games from professional demands on projects.”

He added that, “another reason why a lot of projects fail is because of the lack of communication between project managers, the programme managers and people who designed the projects.”

In view of the last reason, Kulur explained that UNIDO wants to establish team-building between Nigerian government and the different institutions that are involved in projects execution, particularly the Nigerian Industrial Revolution Plan (NIRP) and to get people to have a realistic understanding of what is involved in managing projects.

The National Programme Officer of UNIDO, Mr Reuben Bamidele said participants from the various MDAs include the Bank of Industry (BoI), Industrial Training Fund (ITF), Nigeria Export Processing Zones Authority (NEPZA), Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN), Nigeria Investment Promotion Commission (NIPC), the Central Bank of Nigeria, Standards Organisation of Nigeria (SON) and Consumer Price Index (CPI).

Source: The Sun