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The Project Management Institute of Zimbabwe says the incoming Government must work on delivering national development projects as an avenue for improving the Zimbabwe Human Development Index in the next five years. In a statement, PMIZ secretary general Mr Peter Banda said there was need for the new Government to focus on completing the more than 400 outstanding public projects.
“There are over 400 public projects nationally that have been left incomplete by the Ministry of Public Works. The Joshua Mqabuko Airport, the National University of Science and Technology and Lupane State Universities, the Harare Airport and Bulawayo-Harare roads, just to name a few.
All these must be completed by the incoming Government,” he said.
Mr Banda also cited projects such as the Tokwe-Mukosi Dam in Masvingo, Harare Water works rehabilitation, and the rehabilitation of the Kariba South Power station, as projects that needed to be completed so that the country could fully benefit from them.
He said the country needs to take formal project management seriously and respect formal tools and techniques for managing projects.
“Formal use and application of project management tools must start with Government, as the norm the world over, as many large scale macro projects are in the public sector and sponsored by Government. “No meaningful development in any country can be celebrated without proper initiation and completion of new projects from year to year,” Mr Banda said.
He said more than 600 project managers had been trained in the past four years and these were capable of tackling any assignments in the public works sector.
He added that the new Government should engage all key sectors of the economy in the lobbying for use and recognition of the formal project management practices.
“Given attention, this can add value to strategy delivery for the Government, and bring sanity to the national project management landscape. There are similar tried and tested lessons that have been learnt from Project Management South Africa in a country where the high level of project management maturity is evident in almost all sectors of the national economy,” he said.
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