‘Standardising the method for delivering projects in Nigeria will boost Nation’s GDP’

The Chartered Institute of Project Managers of Nigeria (CIPMN) will from December 11 to 13 conduct its inaugural induction of members into the institute. In this interview, the Registrar of the institute, Mr. Henry Mbadiwe, speaks on the efforts of the institute to professionalise project management in the country in line with the CIPMN Act 2018. Mbadiwe maintains that professionalising project management will positively impact the practitioners and the economy of the country and implores President Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration to throw his weight behind the CIPMN, noting that doing so will help his administration to successfully deliver projects it embarks on.  

The journey to professionalise project management in the country has been a long one. How has CIPMN fared since the Act establishing it came into force in 2018?
When the Act came into force in 2018, there was a delay with the set up, management, issues around how to kick off and funding. Setting up processes, procedures and policies at that time were major challenges.
 
However, we kicked off properly this year with a new governing body. So, we have a new council and we have started doing some work. Part of the work we have done to professionalise project management is that we have worked with the National Universities Commission (NUC) to create a curriculum for studying project management in universities. This is what NUC calls Core Curriculum Minimum Academic Standard (CCMAS). Every university in Nigeria collects the CCMAS from the NUC on all the subjects that they take. In 2022, NUC started to create an updated version of the CCMAS to upgrade what we learn in our universities. We noticed that project management didn’t have a CCMAS. I was drafted in to work with the NUC and about 300 professors from different universities, working on different curriculums. So, CIPMN represented by myself worked on the curriculum for designing and creating the project management CCMAS, which means that every university in Nigeria can now begin to offer a B.Sc in Project Management. You have to create a project management department just as you have an accounting department under the Faculty of Administration and Management. So, I think maybe from 2024, you will begin to see young people being admitted into universities to study project management and graduate with a degree.
 
So, right now you have a profession that already exists and individuals who are professionals. But we can’t be thinking about people who are there now only. We are also thinking about the new set of people that we want to be grooming to come and become professionals. So, as it is today, we have started creating training programmes to try and get individuals who are in charge of projects to become professionalised. We are standardising the method for delivering projects in Nigeria.  People can’t just do it the way they feel. People have been doing it before now but there have been a lot of problems. For instance, recently we started hearing about building collapse. Sometimes, even when a project is delivered successfully, you don’t even know how much you have wasted due to lack of proper risk management. So, we need to begin to professionalise project management.
 
The Act establishing CIPMN empowers the institute to professionalise the project management sector to ensure that anybody delivering projects, hired in any position to lead a project, to manage a team delivering a project, needs to be certified and lincenced by CIPMN to do that. Any company or institution teaching project management or delivering projects, the company needs to be certified to do that; and anybody the company is hiring in that field also needs to be certified to manage those projects, both in public and private sectors. So, our job is to start working on a methodology, a standardisation practice that will ensure success on every kind of project.
 
Project is not just construction. You have projects across all sectors of the economy – financial services project, process improvement project, healthcare project, humanitarian project; you have projects everywhere. So, we need to standardise the practice and ensure that the people leading these projects must be professional project managers, trained, certified and licenced by the CIPMN. 

How far has the CIPMN gone with ensuring that only registered/certified project managers are allowed to execute projects in the country as the Act provides?
  What you are talking about is enforcement. It is not the easiest thing to do because we are just putting our processes together right now. We are also trying to make sure that we have a lot of individuals who begin to know about it. So, we cannot start stopping them now because we need to complete the part of training, certification and licencing. So, what are they going to be taught? How are they going to be trained?  How are they going to be licenced?

How will the forthcoming inaugural induction of members by CIPMN rob off on the project management profession in the country?
The idea of this induction, being the very first by the institute, is to bring in professionals and say, ‘look, you guys are already in the field, you are already doing this, so come let’s discuss.’ Once you are inducted, you are a member. We want to give you a voice. We want you to bring your experience and we will work together to put in a proper process for CIPMN. We need to learn from everybody; we are not claiming to be the alpha and omega of knowledge. During this first induction, the professionals will come together, sit in a room, learn from each other, deliberate and out of the deliberation, create something that will benefit Nigeria.

How will this sharing of knowledge help the profession and economy of the country as a whole?
You know that knowledge grows. You don’t just come for a three-day induction and then suddenly you have all the knowledge you need. It is the starting point of knowledge.
 
When we gather, we are going to be looking at other methodologies of delivering projects created in other climes. America has what you call PMP; British people have what you call PRINCE2. These are two different methodologies. There are other methodologies like AGILE methodology, SCRUM Framework, Lean methodology.
 
Now, in this first induction, we are going to be looking at these methodologies because some people still don’t know them. We are also going to look at how to adapt these methodologies to Nigeria. That’s the idea. You need to adapt whatever knowledge you have got from anywhere to Nigeria’s unique situation.  So, this is the main thing we will be learning at this first induction.

What advice does CIPMN have for the current administration towards curbing the high rate of uncompleted projects across the country?
Let me say this; and I’m not saying it because I want to make anybody feel important. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has just re-started the project delivery tracker where every citizen can go and see the status of every project going on in Nigeria at the moment. It’s an accountability mechanism to ensure that people who are delivering these projects know that we are watching. It’s a sort of assessment by the people. That’s one.

So, what is your advice to the current administration on how to enhance project delivery?
First of all, the government has to put its back behind the CIPMN Act, which says that you cannot manage a project unless you are a certified project manager. It has to put its back behind that law because that law, if properly implemented, will ensure that the CIPMN has an oversight on the individuals delivering these projects so that we can help manage them. It is people that deliver projects; it is people you need to work on. The Federal Government should understand that enough is enough where roads, houses and money are more important than people. People should be the only thing that is important because when you enhance people’s ability, everything else would work.
 
If the government wants to start seeing projects delivered properly, reduce wastes, curb incidents of building collapse, it must invest in people and investing in people means investing in CIPMN because our job is to professionalise the people that are delivering these projects. Professionalise them, enhance them, develop them and tell them to lead your projects and you will definitely see success.

You spoke about DUCAP. How far has the institute gone with its development and use for delivering projects?
 DUCAP is a methodology for delivering projects developed by the institute. I led the team that developed it. The idea was to create a new methodology that takes from all other existing methodologies out there and then brings in the Nigerian factor, as we would call it. Think about it; America creates a methodology for delivering projects but they are in America and they have an ideal. So, no matter how you want to remove them from that environment, that environment is what they still know. Britain will create a methodology for their own benefits, their own ideal for their environment. It might be relevant in other places but some areas work well. For example, AGILE is a methodology that talks about a self-managing team; SRUM also talks about a self-managing team.

But sometimes in Nigeria you might not want to depend on a self-managing team because if you leave people to manage themselves, the way it would come out might not be what you expect.
 
So, when I came up with DUCAP, the idea was to take all the learning from all of these methodologies, take the learning from Nigeria’s dynamic situation and then figure out where the middle is. How do we create something that brings in all the learning and knowledge of these methodologies, considers the unique situation of Nigeria and then mitigates those factors in a learning methodology that can be used in the country to deliver projects in Lagos and also be relevant in Kano, Minna; taking into consideration the cultural and ethnic diversities in such a way that you would not see anywhere else, mitigating the risks that might not have been thought of while creating the methodology in use in America. Of course they have been adjusting their methodologies. But Nigeria is still unique; very unique.  So, we need to ensure that what we create works for Nigeria so that if you come from UK, America or wherever and you want to deliver projects in Nigeria, you should use the DUCAP methodology because this exposes you to some things you might not be thinking of; because it’s not in your culture; it’s not in your climate.

As a growing institute, do you have any plan to collaborate with universities to catch potential professionals young as the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria (ICAN) and other professional bodies are doing?
  We have to. First of all, the work we did with the NUC in building a curriculum means that we need to certify all the project management degrees in Nigeria. So, we are working with the universities already. We need to help them set up project management departments and we need to be able to help these departments run successfully. So, we will work with universities and other training institutions. Do you know that the CIPMN Act says that we have to licence other training bodies in project management? So, if you have PMP from America or PRINCE2 from the UK and you are running a project management training somewhere in this country, we need to licence you to do that so that we will unify the knowledge. It’s not a situation where we will be chasing people around; no! If you want to do it right come; if you don’t want to do it right we will enforce the law.
 
But I assure you that CIPMN is the future. In the UK and America, project managers earn $1000 per day. They are not paid that much because they do nothing. They are paid that much because if you have a good project manager, you are most likely going to save millions. I have worked in the UK, delivering projects for BBC, Virgin, Erikson, Volkswagen Group. In my experience delivering projects in the UK, I have seen companies save millions of pounds because they have a project manager who is on that project making sure that the risks are being mitigated and the project is properly planned to deliver the outcome you want. I delivered a project for Skye in the UK and we had a win back campaign that fetched the company five million pounds in a few months. These are benefits that we can get in Nigeria but we just need to know how to do it.  CIPMN is designed to solve this problem. As the registrar and with the kind of experience that I have, I’m positive that we can definitely bring this to bear.