Hello everyone,
I am Kwabena, joining from Accra, Ghana. I have been managing a PMO that supports large government infrastructure programmes for about seven years now. Roads, water systems, public buildings. The scale is very different from corporate IT projects and I am curious whether others here have experience in this space.
Some things I notice are quite different in infrastructure PMOs:
- The funding is often donor-driven, witch means reporting requirements are extremely rigid and sometimes completely disconnected from actual project needs
- Political interference in project decisions is not the exception, it is the normal operating environment
- Projects can span multiple government administrations, so continuity of knowledge is a constant challenge
For those of you who have worked in public sector or infrastructure PMOs: what frameworks or adaptations have you found most useful? And how do you handle the tension between donor reporting requirements and actually delivering good projects?
Kwabena, the political interference point is very familiar from the public sector infrastructure projects I support in Morocco. The distinction I have come to make is between political interest and political interference. Political interest can actually help a project. When there is genuine mandate at the right level, budget moves faster and decisions get made. Political interference is when that interest turns into decisions being made on grounds that have nothing to do with delivery: scope additions nobody can refuse, contractors chosen for the wrong reasons.
What we do is document every material scope or procurement decision with a named authority and a date. Not as a governance exercise. As something the project team can point to later when they need to explain why a decision was made that they did not make. Has saved a few difficult conversations.
Welcome Kwabena, very happy to see this topic. Infrastructure PMOs are indeed a completely different world and I don't see enough discussion about them here.
I work in Greece for a construction and infrastructure group and what you describe about political interference is very familiar. In our context it is sometimes the regional government, sometimes a ministry, sometimes a large contractor with political connections. The PMO has to navigate all of this while still keeping the project technically on track.
One thing that has helped us: we maintain two parallel views of every project. The 'official view' for the donors and politicians, and the 'real view' for the delivery team. The official view is always positive in tone. The real view is where we track actual risks, actual delays, and actual resource problems. This sounds dishonest but it is really about audience. The delivery team needs accurate information to make good decisions. The political stakeholders need confidence that the programme is under control. Conflating those two audiences in one report usually serves neither well.
Is this a pattern you recognise from your Ghana context?
Kwabena, welcome and thank you for opening this. Infrastructure is genuinely underrepresented in PMO discussions and I would like to see more of it here.
The donor-driven reporting point resonates with something I have noticed across several different contexts: there is often a gap between what the funder wants to measure and what the project actually needs to manage. The indicators that satisfy a reporting framework are not always the ones that would help you anticipate a problem early. Has anyone found a way to run both systems without one of them becoming purely performative?