The Art of Project Completion (isiZulu)

It was on 23 January 2018, when the ‘Communication Team’ profiled a construction project through internal platform - an article titled “Groutville Clinic – Modernised to improve health care efficiency”. On Wednesday 2 October 2019, the ‘Communication Team’ paid a special visit to Groutville for a reality check on construction progress made thus far. Building work has been completed and Public Works has achieved its mandate.

The department deals more with major and capital projects which mainly help to maintain and or improve services rendered by client departments and municipalities, which is often understood as infrastructure projects. Projects of this nature are usually of large-scale, either in the environment and other sectors such as culture, education, roads, energy or Information Communication Technology (ICT).

The art of project completion is therefore a non-compromised activity that a specified assignment or work has to be undertaken and completed within a set time, budget, resources and performance specifications designed to meet the needs of clients, stakeholders and beneficiaries. On the other hand, the department faces changing expectations among its clients and business partners. Today, there is much more of an expectation that Public Works – as an ‘implementing agent of choice’ will deliver not just an isolated project product but a solution to a business problem. Delivering that full solution requires a broader skillset than was traditionally expected.

The art of project completion would also require that when a project leader starts on a new project, she or he should look at the situation and identify the personnel and process problems separately. Then, look at how she or he can address the people problems before beginning to find a solution to the process problems. The good news is that a lot of the art of project management is about solving people problems.

An intriguing issue is the human resource factor and labour turnover. Projects are an ever increasing feature of modern work and are handled by human beings – a project team. The sad part is that people or employees are a lot more complex than you can imagine and they can seem more irrational than we like to believe. A common practice is that professionals in the built environment quickly exit ‘government’, especially when they are in their post-graduation era and or registration stages, where after prefer to re-join the state, especially towards their middle age life stages. This movement really creates infrastructure projects to stall and or be cancelled – this directly or indirectly reflects a negative image on the part of ‘government’. This is a reality and it is true – it is happening. The bottom line to this assertion is that one cannot solve people problems with software – best one can hope to achieve is to refocus some of the professionals’ anger and resentment onto the work tool that one introduces – conducive work environment, better salary and more job enlargement in the course.